The Greatest Gladiator
by StormDragon666
Summary: Once upon a time, there was Sakura, a tortured young girl in a world where the ruling Lords didn't care if their kingdoms burned and starved. Once upon a time, Sakura the Lioness rose up to defend a world that was too weak to defend itself. AU SakuCentric
1. A World Long Rotting

**EDIT, MAY 2012: At least at the moment, I'm quite interested in polishing up this story a bit and then updating, as I am doing for Airborne. I always had a special, dark spot in my heart for Greatest Gladiator, and this Sakura unlike any other I've written, and this truly nightmarish, godless world she lives in. I always liked the idea of Lords, power-holding figures, who were selfish, cold and powerful bastards to the greatest extreme (who STILL managed to have a very special spot in their own hearts for Sakura. Ehehe. That's just what I write and always shall be.) I think this is where I first used the idea of Sakura being called a "lioness," which I occasionally used in other stories, and also just daydreams and story musings, for years afterward and even now. Like Airborne, or perhaps even more so than Airborne...though Greatest Gladiator story sat untouched for a long time, I would never dream of letting go of it, or stop being proud of it, or allow it to truly be separated from me or forgotten.  
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**And for this reason I've made progress on the mythical next chapter, which stands at nearly 4K words, and just finished editing the first chapter. Congratulations, if you're reading this, you're the first to know.**

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After watching 300 for the third or so time and after playing Sly Cooper continuously I got the idea of another fanfiction, perhaps by some odd blend of the two. This has been in my head since about the first week of April, and I've thought about it musingly on and off. My first picture of it was of Sakura in some fighting ring, sitting down, her hands tied behind her back, with someone punching her repeatedly in the face while the crowds cheer. She spits blood from her mouth at her tormentor, and is punched some more before her hands spontaneously break free from the ropes; she grabs the tormentor's collar and hurls them into the far wall, where their body makes an unpleasant, wet thumping sound. This may or may not become a scene in this story later on.

This fanfiction was begun on a whim, I suppose (though a "whim" for me can last days or weeks; anything and everything stays in my mind a long, long time.) However, I still thought about it the least, and wrote it the fastest, than any story I have ever thus far. And for that reason I have few beginning comments about it except "the setting in this story makes me cry." Read on and find out what I mean.

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At The Information Vault

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In higher, cleaner circles the world is made of cream and silk, and small circles they are, as hardly anyone even knows what those things are. So much of the world is just the opposite. Life does not move with smooth fancies and art and silk. It moves with blood and bone and metal and power.

In my world, which I think is still like the majority of the whole world outside it, there are the supernaturally powerful folk called shinobi. We are supposed to fear them. We do. I like to think I am so different, so separate from others because of what I've done, but in this way, I'm not. I worry as much as anyone what a shinobi could do to me. You can never guess, because each one of them has some special, vicious power they can use to do whatever they wish. I would use mine to defend myself. Shinobi usually use theirs to howl aloud their dominance, to hurt others to do just that, and these things are always done under the eyes of their lord.

The lord is the one who decides who suffers and who does not. A lord rules over a land, and he rules with every inch, every boneless scrap of freedom possible. There is not the slightest challenge, and he has no duties to anyone, not even the shinobi, who are like a lord's wolves. It is not his job to make his land prosperous and peaceful or give out any niceties to people he comes by. Most often a lord makes it his job to choose families, or villages, to have the honor of making his own niceties, such as his clothes or food or favored entertainment. And them, he will protect. Perhaps their village will be moved to the foot of his castle so he does not have to travel far to take from them. They're directly under his eyes, and very lucky for it. They will be protected from attack and peril, and their crops and livestock will grow uninterrupted and fine. Indeed, nothing but the finest for the lord and his shinobi!

For everyone else, every other person in the world who is not so privileged, there is a saying, one that began in the Land of the Sand and spread on winged tongues to all places. "For everyone else, fire!"

When I was young, there were several spots of knowledge in which I was laughably ignorant, and I had to have this explained to me until I could explain it, too. Fire is all suffering, fire is death, starvation, the loss of everything. The rage, the dread. The way men live. A brother dead, a child diseased, a man , a woman defenseless, a limb rotting and a cellar empty, and hungry, rumbling beasts pushing down your door. Everyone has something. And all of it, all suffering, is done on barren land. I cannot attest to this myself, but it's said that only the land near a lord's castle has grass anymore...I have never seen grass.

I do wish I could. It's green, and I'm very fond of green things. I see green eyes sometimes, usually beasts' eyes or the skin of a long-dead or hurting man. I am probably too fascinated with green skin...or rather, I often wonder how a man changes, how things can make you sick, and why. I can't do any more than sit in my dark space and wonder, and have ideas. I like my ideas. I hardly need distractions anymore, but on that one day in a blue moon when I do, my thoughts are there.

But again, I hardly need them. I am used to the carnage. It is my life.

When I am not healing another's tears, or sweeping dirt from my dress, I think about the life of shinobi and what that must be like, also. Sometimes I see them in the stadium; they are not difficult to identify. Each of them has their unique power, and their spryness of body. Each shinobi comes into contact with a god that gives them strength and relative youth far longer than a body ought to have those things. And with all these advantages, a shinobi might become a lord himself one day. I think that is the ultimate goal of all of them, though until they achieve that rare, rare dream, they are at the lord's beck and call. They are not so much more free than the rest of us.

Nay, only the lords are free. They have triumph over everything, everyone, and similarly, they come up in my rambling thoughts more often than I like, despite how few in number they are. They are only five. Five in all the world, at any time, one for each of the great lands. My favorite, the favorite of all, is Lady Temari. The only female lord, thus her title is rewritten to "Lady;" she is the only one who deserves the grandeur of lordship. Lady Temari ruled over the Land of the Sand, with her two younger brothers, both shinobi, at her side. Her reign was not so long ago, and not nearly, not at _all, _so feared and submitted to as the other lords. Lady Temari was kind. She gave to citizens she came across. She did not rend the flesh or property of anyone she so pleased, nay, only those who threatened or challenged her, as any lord must to maintain their power and position. For a decade, she ruled. For a decade, unknowable ever before, the people were happy.

Lady Temari had been the greatest of all.

But all reigns end. A lord, like a shinobi, has a greater supply of energy and youth than any one average man. The lady was nearing forty years when she was deceived and killed by her trusted brothers. And they, foul, black-hearted hounds, were killed the following month. That killer was the most deceitful, the most cunning of all. That murderer is Sasori, and he is now the Lord of Sand, and has been for twenty-one years.

He is the same as the other four, as any lord before or after him: he has a few chosen villages to supply him with his pleasantries and passions, and a castle, to house and reinforce the blood-run power that he is. Like (almost) any lord before or after him: he was a shinobi before being a lord, and killed his superior to take his position. There exist shinobi who defected from their own lord to take the head of a different one. Asuma was one. But Kakashi cut off all his limbs and then his head, and he rules there now. It is ascension through murder. The very phrase makes me balk and grind my teeth.

I balk now at how I ramble. But what else am I supposed to do with my time?

I am not finished with my morose story. Apologies, but I only want to tell the truth to those who want to hear it. And if you are here, you are here for truth, aren't you? If you're here for pleasant lies, or easy paths, leave me, or I shall come round to where you are and drag you out by your hair. So listen to me. All I've spoken and thought of in this time is the whole world around me, lands wider than man could walk, men who destroy, people who are ripped apart and raped and killed. You have yet to hear about me, and my own world. Maybe it is even worse. My home is the Undergrounds. It is a system of caves, tunnels, and stone arenas. I stand in these arenas, and fight demons with my hands.

This is just a place to me, somewhere to exist and in my free time, think, whisper, and wish for baths. But I think my view on it is rather skewed. People come here to see a person, a person like me, a coward like Ebisu, any person...be faced with a beast in a free space. Spectators watch from the stone seats and yell. That yelling is really familiar to me. It's probably familiar to all the shinobi, too, as the Undergrounds is where they train, learn to move and fight, and people have always known that they were "born" here. People have always known that chakra, the unearthly force that makes shinobi so great, is born in the Undergrounds with them, when a man is at his limit and still attempts to go on fighting.

The Undergrounds are the place where kidnapped children and young girls are taken to when their guardians lose them. They will be pinned and used and seduced here, or tossed into the ring. And people will watch as they try to run. It makes me shiver. It makes me want to grasp rocks and torched bones in my palm, and crush them to dust and spatters. Many people are silent at this, but I am certainly not the only one who cringes at this injustice. But it is true and practiced daily around the world no matter how I feel about it.

The Undergrounds are fierce places, and highly beloved places to those aboveground. The spectators are often shinobi, or healthy village men. Perhaps a lord occasionally even watching a match in the Undergrounds. Wouldn't it be their ultimate, most selfish pleasure? They can while away time here, watching fights, pleasuring themselves in every way, exulting in their jewels and glory and women while the common people above them, above ground, starve and kill and cry out. This is my world, this dark, bleeding place for the grand and the strong only.

Whatever it looks and seems like, it is earth and not hell, and there are good-hearted people here. People like me.

My name is "Sakura," and Sakura only. I have lived here so long I cannot remember my life before being here. I do not know how old I am, but the girls here who cling to me and cry tell me I must be seventeen, or perhaps sixteen, as thinness can look as though it takes age out of you. How old I am, and my age, are two different things, I think. After all, how is it that I may be seventeen, and feel so old and angry?

That might be a fault of the Undergrounds itself. It requires fighting and quick learning. No room for enjoyment, for the enjoyment of youth. Just violence. Whispering to cellmates in the dark. Standing up many times.

So long ago when I first had to stand up after being felled. How many years? I can't possibly know. How irksome. Irksome! Irksome was not what I thought then, as a child with such long hair, shivering and seeing a tiger for the first time. Or at least the thing looked like a tiger. It was there, the thousand lights and thousand torches of the spectators were there. People screeching at me and a layer of sand under my feet. I saw the tiger's teeth and the pinkish meat caught between his largest fangs. I felt sure it was human meat, and soon he would rip me open and I would be human meat, too. But that couldn't be. I wanted life so badly in that moment, I simply could not be human meat for a monster or for entertainment. The thing came at me, eager to change that. I remember its roar and its huge feet.

There must have been some admirable fight in me that night, that's for sure. I ran at the young tiger, too, and tackled it to the ground. We wrestled. I tried to dig my fingers into soft parts, under its "arms," on the belly, in its eyes and ears. The thing pierced me all over, ripped my clothes and pulled pieces of my hair out. Such pain there was...such pain I worked through, crying and screeching, dragging up the tiger's neck till I was curved round it, and snapped its spine. It was my first kill and I would have a thousand more.

I can fight beasts like tigers because I am strong. I am a bit small, but this does not stop me from lifting beasts my full weight and far larger, and hurling them into walls. I have worked hard, been brave too many times, and become strong. I can withstand any monster's assault. Some people tell me I can do this because I have chakra within me, like a shinobi does. I disagree, because I feel that I'd know if I had such a thing. All I knew at the time, all I know now, is that I killed a monster with my bare hands, and I can repeat the feat at any time. And at the time, when I had killed the tiger and the men of the Underground dragged me back to my cell with the other girls, I was proud, and shaking. Thirsty, too. None of that mattered, though, as once I was in the cell, I came to realize other girls here were crying, as I'd been deaf to them amidst my own fear when I had first come in not much earlier.

The girl nearest me was much older than me, and her hair very light. She shrunk away from my hand, and then came back to it desperately. She shoved into me and out of instinct and helplessness I tried to comfort her and patted her shoulder. She cried into my shoulder for a long time, darkening my bloody, old gown with tears, and it did not take me long to brush away these tears, and feel the warm, wet hole in the woman's head. She was lacking an eye, and the hole was jagged. It had been gouged out.

And then the door was opened, and a man with a torch came in, and took me through a maze of stone hallways to the arena where I fought another beast.

Almost every day of my life I've been taken out of that dark cell, escorted down a maze of halls and put into a ring where I fight another beast and another thousand people watch me from an arena. This is a place that is actually a huge room carved from some underground cave, someplace where true light doesn't exist. Then again, the outside world where true light shows itself isn't much better than the Undergrounds. I don't really know why I saw a difference in these places.

The only difference I really note is the different girls who appear in my cell. They come and go all the time, and when they are here, I speak to them. I help them. I must say something, as most of them will due the day or the week they are captured an taken here. Most of them are going to be killed by monsters and I want them all to die knowing they had a friend, someone to cling to and stay with in their last day.

Because it's always their last day. For all but me. I am the oldest, longest-living victim, or fighter, or survivor, ever to be seen here. Or at least, around this sector of the Undergrounds. Perhaps fifty miles from here no one has heard of me, and there are fifteen fantastic fighters like me.

But that possibility doesn't matter.

When a guard and some well-dressed man comes down to my dark cell and looks in at me through the bars, inspecting me, I shiver and look away,but I try to put on a brave act and not go and hide behind some other girl. Despite how I hate when people look at me, I am not that pathetic. The ring where I fight the beasts is not nearly so bad as when a single man comes down to look at me through the cell bars. I can't see those people as well way up in the stands and I can pretend that they're not looking at me. I can pretend that only I and the monster before me exist in the world.

Here is something that you may find strange, but I find crucial to my tale. When I am not fighting, when that half hour or so of my day is over and I am walked back to my cell with the cool, stone walls, near-complete darkness and crowd of whimpering girls of varying ages, I sit in some random place in the room and let my mind wander. I sit, awake, and dream.

I dream all kinds of things. I dream about myself having fantastic adventures or being the star of a dismal mystery. I see people I've never known but my mind has made up, doing sometimes insane things like flying with the birds in the sky or average, everyday things like boarding up their windows from vandals at night. I dream about medicine, salves and drinks that can bring man back from the brink of death.

But the greatest thing I dream about is just that: a dream. I dream of a world where lords care for their land and their people, where monsters and criminals don't wander the empty hills at all times, where people don't murder someone to become the most powerful person in the land and rule over a nation they don't care about.

This is the only reason I smile—well, sometimes I smile when I'm fighting and winning, but usually that's as natural and uneventful as breathing, so…you understand.

What, did you think I became a shell of a girl after eight or nine years of killing monsters under the watch of a thousand greedy people? You are wrong. I told you before I am strong. I can pick up a fully-grown lion and throw it across the arena. You think that if I have the strength to do that, to do that for years, I would break? That I would curl up in a weeping ball and lie awake to feel the breaking of my own heart?

You are wrong.

You have seen me crush rocks and quietly rage at the people who live in this world. You know how I feel about what exists out there.

If this world is nothing but a hellpit, then there's no harm in me trying to make it better. It can't get much worse than it is now. I have seen the worst of this world. I _live _in the worst of this world. I believe that if I keep fighting, if I keep winning, something will happen. I will win a battle against a beast and the guard who usually takes me back to the dark cell full of crying girls will take me someplace else. I will escape from that place, to the outside world that I haven't seen for close to a decade, and I will wait. Hardly ever does someone from the Undergrounds escape from the Undergrounds. Even the common, pathetic people above ground know that.

I will gain attention that way. I will kill the evil to make my way to one of the five lords. I will kill the bandits, the men who still daughters and wives, the beasts that assault and rape the innocent. And I will kill the first lord that I find.

I am faster than the cheetah. I am stronger than the bear. I am braver than the lioness. This life in the Undergrounds has made me perfect in any surviving art I will need in the outside world.

When I kill a lord, I will become a lord myself. I will become Lor—no. I will be _Lady _Sakura. Being a lord, being a lady, is the highest position of power anywhere. If you want to set your entire land on fire, your shinobi would have no choice but to do it for you, no matter how much they wanted you to rot in hell. With that power, with my own willpower, I will change what exists out there. I will change many villages, perhaps a whole land, given some years. I have proven myself more than any other person I've ever met. Perhaps I could change the world.

Even if the other four lords send all their shinobi after me, if they come after me themselves, I will fight to my last breath. I will be flung into the Godless One's mouth before I surrender to the demon-men who torture others. I will do something, anything! I will help, I will destroy any evil I find, I will...I will do good. That's all I've ever wanted: to do good.

If I can't become a lord, I can at least kill some shinobi. I can at least do _something _to help. My life's hardly worth anything. It's the lives of everyone else, the lives of the good people like the girl of one eye, from so long ago, that are worth something.

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...How dark.

Well that's what this story is going to be about. The inspirational, maybe-just-if-you-believe possible story of one girl who may or may not end up changing the world, because almost everyone on Earth is suffering.

I don't think there will be any specific pairings in this story (but for my now-usual MultiSaku, which is just what I write so get used to it, sir ;D ) Soon you will be acquainted with all the lords, and Sakura's more specific plans for ruling her own kingdom. But there are challenges and depressing quests and sights aplenty before she gets that far, so the lords will wait a bit...or will they?

The lords include Sasori, Pain, Naruto, and...well, the other two I haven't decided yet. Give me another chapter. Just be aware that since they're lords, that implies that they're all total bastards who have no regard for the people of their kingdom. _Implies. _

Well...that's all I have to say. Till next update.

Ta...Storm


	2. Hope Was Harvested Long Ago

Just to let you all know, this story was also inspired by the novel "The Road" by Cormac McCarthy. It's a novel about a father and son, both unnamed, traveling through the remains of America which has been hit by some horrible catastrophe. It is cold constantly and the ground is covered in black snow and ash. The father and son are trying to stay alive with their meager supplies and keep from being mobbed by the few other survivors, some of whom will go as far as cannibalism because there is so little food left in the world. It is the only book that ever came close to making me (the epitome of calmness and emotional control) cry, particularly because of the ending.

To honor that book and remind you all that this story is supposed to have a seriously "bum-you-guys-out" atmosphere, in the beginning of every chapter from now on, I will put a few paragraphs describing the huge amount of cons and lack of pros to this universe. In these first few paragraphs, you'll find the reason behind the chapter title.

Oh, and it's also going to be told in third person from now on, because only the first and last chapters are going to have Sakura telling the story herself with words like "I" and "me." You will notice a great difference between Sakura's gloomy chapter one intro and her ending note in the future.

I've decided for this fanfic to be my "break" fanfiction. Whenever I don't feel like writing, I always feel I can write for this story, at least a paragraph or so, because…I don't know. I just can. So maybe it will end up having some fast updates. Let's see.

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At The Information Vault

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The people of the world, the average people, were sorrowfully indifferent to the reality of their lives. The fact that they had to board up their windows from demons and thieves every night, the fact that one fourth of all children were kidnapped or killed or lost, had become normal centuries ago. The single, meager meal of the day was a treasure, often the only thing they learned to look forward to.

Worse still was the fact that there were gods living in golden castles in the sky far above them. Everyone knew they existed and watched the people of earth and did nothing to save them. Yet the gods would look to the shinobi of the black-hearted lords and grant them youth and power and speed that lasted until their dying breath. The gods would give power to these devils and leave the innocent to starve and die and the innocent knew it. The word "innocent," in fact, was hardly a word any longer. Now it referred only to a sobbing and helpless virgin, begging to be spared by the lusty group of men before her.

With such qualities in the world, it was not uncommon to see women, or even men, who cried when they saw their newborn child. The tears would not be of happiness, of gratitude to the gods and to nature for this new life, but of mourning and pity, self-pity and pity for the infant.

There were people who thought that childbirth was a sin to the child, for forcing the poor pathetic thing to have to face a life this living hell, and also a sin to the parents, for having another mouth to feed and a body to protect. The parents of Sakura were probably the same. The greatest probability was that her parents had had too many children already, or didn't want to deal with a firstborn at all, and had left her to fend for herself as an infant.

How she lived to be a young child wandering the roads alone, how she lived to be eight years old, how she lived past _one _year, how she lived to be captured by workers of the Undergrounds to be a show attraction, was not known by anyone. And it didn't matter. No one cared.

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March 31st, 2:20 AM

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Comforting the fallen pitiful was something the young maiden Sakura had gotten used to over the years. When she came back from her beast-fights in the ring, she was returned to her huge cell and the girls she last remembered being there were gone, murdered, replaced by new ones who would share the same fate. At least two dozen were put into the cell per day, and two dozen almost always were gone within the next twenty-four hours.

And no matter how old these girls were, Sakura found the one who looked most pathetic, and did her best. It was her first attempt to change the world. She had done it hundreds of times, thousands, perhaps. It may have made a difference a few dozen times.

Such was an occasion now. The girl that Sakura was comforting was ten years old at the most. She had an oversized, itchy brown robe for clothing, probably a garment of her father's. Leaves and mud were caked in the girl's long, dark hair and on her robe but her face was clean. This may have been due to the tears she constantly swept away from her eyes and all over her cheeks. Sakura crouched in the corner of the huge cell next to her, murmured soft and meaningless words into her ear, and rubbed her scarred arm, but the sobbing hardly ceased.

A light appeared from beyond the bars of the cell door. A man, a guard, was coming in to take some of the girls to the rings to die. To die by the claws of some nameless, hungry animal or merciless muscled man. His keys jangled as he unlocked the door and opened it. The sobs ceased only slightly. There were no whimpers. The man, shorter in stature even than petite Sakura, pointed at the girl that Sakura was comforting.

"Come with me. Now." the command was flat, uncaring, lazy. The pink-haired girl was used to picking some girls up, helping them stand and watching them walk away. She was also used to seeing the named girl run to the back of the cell and hide behind some others, crying and begging. She would be dragged away kicking and sobbing. But this girl, eyes still tearing, stood up and let the man take her hand and lead her away.

Sakura sighed. The guard closed the barred door after the girl left, and the door beyond, leaving the rest of the trapped females within darkness once more, the single torch in their cell lighting almost nothing around it.

The heroine of our story was not yet eighteen, or not seventeen, she wasn't quite sure, and she was clothed in a turquoise cloth dress that nearly reached her knees, strapping over her shoulders in a manner that was gruff and not elegant. The dress was bloodstained all about the torso, for this was the garb the men gave to Sakura most often, the garb she most often fought in. Beasts almost always lunged for the throat or chest, resulting in irremovable blotches of dark blood.

It was in this dress, some years ago, still a young girl, that she had picked up a grown lion and thrown it across the fighting stadium. For that occasion, once every while, perhaps once every two months, Sakura would be lucky enough to hear a person in her stands call her "Lioness," and that was one of the few occasions in her life where she knew of delight and pride.

Her hair had been cut short with knives by the guards, so that it would not be in her face while fighting, and it retained an an unnatural brightness in color that matched the, also unnatural, shining of her eyes. The maiden's eyes were the color of emeralds, strangely beautiful in a place where beauty had no place. The skinniness of her limbs, and the contrastingly powerful muscle that gave them their shape, had been fed by countless battles to the death and unsavory rations that an Underground victim was forced to endure.

Most, if not none, of the other girls in the cell shared her shape of body. Most of them were lanky and gaunt and shivering with weakness. The few that did have her body shape had been in the cell for half a week at most and had been forced into that frame by starvation with their own families.

When the guards first brought a new girl into the cell, that girl had about six seconds to use the better light to see the others in the cell. If she was lucky enough to see this pink-haired fighter, they would have been _extremely _lucky. They would have had something, a strange, bright-eyed girl, to think about besides their own horror until they were escorted into a stadium to have their murder witnessed by hundreds.

Sakura looked about the area. After several years of spending almost all her life in a dark cell with other darkly-clad females, her eyes had gotten used to darkness and she could see fairly well in it. The Undergrounds' stadiums were lit with a thousand torches on the ceiling and on the walls and it was nearly as bright as daylight, but much hotter as well. With these two environments, she had both common vision and a decent sort of nightvision. She planned to use this to her advantage whenever she left the Undergrounds. Surely it would help with the fact that she had no sense of time whatsoever.

The small maiden moved herself until she sat against the wall, the rather comfortably cold stone wall, and closed her eyes to sleep. She had no idea how close her goal lay, and she was not prepared, but found that, after hundreds of battles with nightmarish monsters, she could make herself prepared in the space of a second. So it would be.

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April 6th, 2:20 AM

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"Pink hair." That was what most of the guards called her. She wished she knew the guards' names, so that perhaps she could use it against them one day and kill them, but found the guards never had names besides "you" or "hey, man with the weird scar" so it was futile.

Sakura was laying on her back towards the front of the cell. She turned her head, emerald eyes lazy but bright, and stared at the guard. "Time for a fight." he said, gesturing to her with one finger. Sakura stood up, pointlessly brushed the side of her turquoise dress and let the guard take her hand in his callous one. He locked the door to the females' cell and pulled her along.

The walk always took about fifteen minutes, Sakura had absently realized long ago. It was just another fact of life, like the fact that she had two arms and legs and eyes. But to amuse herself, to keep from being bored at staring at the stone walls pass by yet again, she counted the minutes. After seventeen minutes and forty-one seconds, the guard and Sakura turned the corner to the last hallway. Beyond Sakura could see a bright orange light lighting up the far corridor. The thousand torches of one of the Undergrounds stadiums. The anxious, exciting cheering and whooping. The grassy, wild smell of some animal waiting to fight, Sakura's only connection to the scents of the outside world lost to her years ago.

"By the time I hit ten, you'll be out there." It was a command. Sakura nodded listlessly, her mind secretly awhirl with fighting tactics and raw will. "One," Sakura began walking down the corridor. When the man said, "Seven," she was within the glow of the torches. When the man said, "Eight," she moved out of the corridor and into a great room with a ceiling seemingly high as the sky.

There was a flat, sandy area at the bottom, the ring, circled by rows upon rows of stone and wooden benches, some carved from fine mahogany and some from jagged, untidy driftwood. Almost each and every seat was taken up by some man or woman in strange, foreign yet beautiful garment fit only for an urbane ball. Uncountable orange sticks of fire lined the walls and the ceiling. But all Sakura had eyes for was the monster sitting at the other end of the ring, waiting for her.

Demons in this world were not just a figment of nightmares and imagination. They were as real as the thieves that haunted the roads and towns at night, as real as the very air. It was said that the first few demons had been the pets of some shinobi, serving some lord centuries ago. The demons escaped to the woodlands and went on a mad mating spree, some attempting to even use female humans for reproduction.

That was why, it was said, demons appeared in every shape and size imaginable, yet always hideous: they could breed with anything, so long as it was female.

They were almost always black or grey, rarely brown or purple. This one looked nearly like a bear covered in long grey fur like a sheepdog, yet its ears were so long that they trailed in the sand at its clawed feet. The long fur and ears, and the eye that was on its front-left leg, were the only things that kept it from looking like an actual animal.

It lifted its head and made a groaning, pained sort of sound, and kept its head in the air while it ran towards Sakura with a limping yet fast gait. She was ready when it came at her, ready when it slammed its head down on her waiting arm like a hammer. The audience cheered again and again and the arena seemed to grow hotter as they saw that the girl could have a limb torn off if the beast could move but a few feet closer.

The force of its head coming down was enough to send any average human to their knees. But no human who could live in the Undergrounds was an average human. Frowning grimly, Sakura shoved her free arm, her right arm, into the beast's mouth and grasped the rough, bumpy tongue. It cried out, its three eyes going wide and its huge feet stamping the ground anxiously. Sakura tugged and tugged with all the might of the monsters she had conquered before. The demon's tongue came out of its mouth, severed and bleeding and writhing and the crowd stomped their feet for it.

"Ugghhgaan!" The demon staggered back and spat its blood onto the sand covering the arena. Sakura squeezed the tongue, wringing it of blood and fluid, glaring balefully at the monster while her skin shone with sweat of battle and heat.

In the next few seconds the demon went insane, and was running at the petite maiden with all the rage it was worth. Sakura prepared to duck and deliver a kick to the demon's legs, hoping to sever them with the force of it. But the thing ducked its head and took her leg into its mouth.

Making an expression quite like a grin, the thing reared its ugly head and tossed Sakura to the other side of the arena. She crashed into the wall just below the first row of seats and the viewers leaned down to look at her, exclaiming and pointing. Sakura groaned and felt the hot blood welling at the back of her head and tried to ignore the ringing that drowned out all other noise and the heat all around her that felt worse than usual. The demon was running at her again, tongue-less mouth open and ready to rip away at her.

Fear filling her blood she he improvised, as she often did. She kicked out one leg and it caught the monster on the lower jaw. The bone cracked and the demon was hurled away, rolling until landing on its belly. Blood oozed from its mouth and two new wounds on its legs. The thing had died.

The crowd erupted. The heat grew more and more unbearable. Sakura panted and swept a hand across her sweating face and made her indifferent way back to the corridor which would lead to her refreshingly cold cell. A new guard, one she'd never seen before, stood there waiting for her just out of sight of the crowd. He grasped her hand, and Sakura flinched at the feel of it. It was unknown, soft, scented, hardly rough. And the way he smelled… This man had surely been to the outside recently.

"Come with me, pink hair." he said. Sakura stared blankly into his eyes and nodded. "That demon's bite was meant to rip your leg off, not to throw you. I trained that beast myself. I know. That was one of the strongest demons I've tamed."

"That monster seemed the same as any other animal I've fought. I wouldn't have guessed he was your strongest beast." She expected to be slapped for this remark. Talking when her voice wasn't wanted was worthy of a slap. It was common enough. So she was mildly surprised when the guard replied, as though he was talking to a _person _and not an Underground fighter, "Exactly. My strongest was no different to you than any other monster we fetch from the wild. You are being given a new task. Something else to try your skills at."

"What sort of new task?" Surely that would have her slapped. She was truly expecting it, but again the guard replied quite calmly, "Seduction."

Sakura could have laughed. Surely there were maidens more suited to it, maidens who weren't muscled and tiny and untidy as she was, and fifty times more refined and civil. But she accepted the notion of her stupid and useless self being used as an entertainment object as another pointless, painful thing of the world. It couldn't be helped.

Not now, anyway.

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April 4th, 10:15 PM (back in time about a day and a half)

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_Elegance._

_Power._

_Glory._

_Luxury._

_Pleasure._

God.

These things belonged to the gods of the earth, the _self-proclaimed _gods of the earth: the five lords of the five great lands. These fine things were locked up in the lords' castles and only the lords, and perhaps a few of their better shinobi, had access to them. Those that did would often find themselves lifting their arms up into the air and laughing.

"These things the finest to be found on the planet and they are _mine!" _they would say.

But the fineries were not all locked up in the five castles. Some of them were in the Undergrounds, the thousands of underground tunnels and chambers throughout the world where people were pit against beasts. The audience for this murder was made up of the villagers of the lord's "chosen." The few villages of the land that made the lord's food and clothing and jewelry were the ones who were privileged to come to the Undergrounds and watch the unfortunates, the majority of their land, die.

In the Undergrounds the residents of the "chosen" villages may just be lucky enough, or rather have enough pocket money, to pay a courtesan's fee. A courtesan, mind you, is nothing but a fancy and well-dressed whore who charges much more than what she is worth. Most of the courtesans of the world could be found in the Undergrounds. The few that weren't there were at the greatest position they could get themselves: the bedchambers of the lords and their shinobi.

Courtesans and even low-class but exceptionally pretty hooker were frequent visitors to the bedchambers of lords, in fact. It was common knowledge that most lords were visited by at least two courtesans a week. No lord was a virgin, and if a new lord came up one day and _was _a virgin, he wouldn't be for long.

When someone referred to "The Undergrounds" they could mean all the hundreds of of underground chambers throughout the world or just the one they happened to live nearest to. When I, the narrator, say that Pein, Lord of the Land of Rain, was relaxing in the Undergrounds, I mean that he was relaxing in the Undergrounds that were nearest to his home, his castle in the Land of Rain.

There were special chambers reserved for him and his shinobi, naturally, and they'd all been dealing with rather strenuous and life-threatening training in the past few months. Pein decided to give his men—and women, for there were a few female shinobi—a break and let them amuse themselves in the Undergrounds just a few miles away from (and under, of course) his castle.

He was there now, one of his own chambers reserved for the godly only: for him and his most trusted subordinates. If the velvet cushions stuffed with crane feathers did not relax one's muscles immediately, the warm and dim atmosphere, burning incense in the air, walls draped with silken weavings and lonely corners decorated with statues and busts carved from pure gold and silver would surely leave an average commoner breathless.

The crane-feather cushions were a favorite of any he allowed to use them. It was usually only Hidan and Kakuzu, his most trained and trusted shinobi, who dared to lay upon them at all, even with permission. They called themselves brothers but no one knew if this was true or not, not even them. Both were nearly thirty years old, but as shinobi, given youth and power and speed by the gods, they appeared at least ten years younger. (But Kakuzu, some other shinobi dared to joke, had been the butt of some god's stupid joke, as he certainly looked older than Hidan.)

Back to the point I must go—here, Pein, Lord of Rain, lay reclining on his favorite crane-feather cushions, breathing in expensive incense and feeling tired and aroused at the mixture of erotic dancing before him and a sip of wine every ten seconds.

Courtesans were a regular part of a lords life in the same way that horses were a part of a stablehand's life. These two had been in the beds of all five lords and were considered the best to be found anywhere. Ino Yamanaka was the first, born and bred into a brothel in the Land of the Leaf, ruled by the young lord named Naruto and sold to Pein for the price of half a dozen mansions. For that price he would keep her and bed her as many times as he liked for a month before selling her to whichever lord would pay the most.

The other was Karin, who had no last name, because she had been a nobody when the world first noticed she existed. She had begged to be let into a brothel at the age of sixteen, with nowhere else to go but with a body she knew would make her richer than any woman dared dream.

Both were somewhere around the age of twenty-two, and the five lords were considering giving them the same life-lasting youth that shinobi received, for their services were simply so _good _that it would be worth it to give the effort to get such things. Right now the lord couldn't think of that, however, he could think of little else besides his own lust. The right combination of colored tops and teasing, flowing skirts could make any courtesan or common whore look good, but it did these two whole worlds of benefit. One of them was minutes away from coming to bed with him, and the other would have the same fate with one or even two of his shinobi.

Dancing, dancing…how could any two humans have such skill at it? Their delicate grace and sensually teasing moves mesmerized Pein every time. The clacking of beads, the swish of feather-thin clothing meant only to be ripped off the wearer, the scent of white wine and vanilla perfume…was ruined by a knock on the doors.

"Lord, Lord! Genma Onimusha wishes to pay his yearly homage, Lord!"

Ino stopped her erotic dance and stomped her foot on the floor. The sound was muffled by the thick carpet and pillows littering the floor in an eye-appeasing pattern. "Ohhhh! Why are we _always _interrupted at the climax of our dance? O fine lord, maybe we can ignore this foolish messenger for a bit an continue our—"

"No such thing." the orange-haired king said immediately. "Enter." One glance sent the blonde courtesan back a step, and she fiddled foolishly with the beads in her hair. Pein's eyes were, after all, completely unnaturally colored for a human and frightening even when he didn't mean them to be. Pein knew this, and knew that any look he gave Ino that wasn't amorous would send shivers up her pathetically fragile spine.

A few moments later, the messenger meekly opened up the door. He was a brunette youngster, some five or six years Ino and Karin's junior, and scrawnier than any starving animal Pein could bother to mention at that moment. "Genma Onimusha, your Highness…" the youth said with fake dignity. "He owns the Undergrounds just at the southern tip of your kingdom, not far from here, and he wishes to pay his yearly homage with this." The youth held out a scroll that was tied with fancy and fake green string.

Pein recognized the type immediately: only the finest artists, artists that the lords chose for themselves, would use such scrolls with such strings. This was a painting of some sort. The brunette youth squeaked as the scroll suddenly left his hand and twin scars were left on his palm in its place.

He didn't mention the pain that was slowly growing in his hand. That could and would cost him a limb, the way it had cost his mother three limbs. "Sir Onimusha has had a certain maid locked up in his female victim cell for nearly a decade." This was enough to get a raise of the lord's graceful brows. Any one person surviving that long in the Undergrounds was unheard of.

"She is believed to be hardly seventeen years old, and hardly even my size. Every day, sometimes twice a day, she is taken out of the cell full of other females and fights a beast in an arena. Animals, sometimes demons. She's killed every single one. She can lift creatures easily thrice her size and weight. No matter how close she comes to dying each time, she always manages to keep herself alive. She is faster than a falcon and stronger than a tiger, but what Sir Onimusha wanted me to assure you of was her beauty. You may see it in that scroll, lord."

Pein had been staring at the unopened scroll while the frightened messenger spoke, and opened the scroll soon after the youth asked him to do so. His unnatural eyes widened at the illustration before him. "Is this accurate?" he asked flatly. The messenger knew what a flat voice meant: seriousness. For what reason? He didn't know. He wasn't supposed to know.

"Onimusha wanted to assure you that the artist who created that picture takes every living detail he can see and copies it, and if you think he is wrong he offers his hands for you to chop off, lord. She looks exactly the way she does pictured there. Better. Yes, Onimusha wanted me to tell you she's more beautiful than that illustration shows."

The painting of Sakura was flattering but accurate, for lack of better explanation. It showed her during the thick of battle, a front view angled just a smidge to the side, backed by a nondescript, dark crowd in one of the many underground stadiums of the Undergrounds. She was staring fiercely at some unseen enemy with eyes alight with fire as green as emerald. The gown she wore was bloodstained and torn but showed a satisfying amount of skin that was perfect despite the bleeding cuts and scars. Her hair hardly touched her shoulders and even in the two-dimensional coloring, Pein could practically feel its sleek thickness under his fingers.

He _wanted _it under his fingers.

"Her name is Sakura. Her last name is unknown. Genma Onimusha would like to give you this maid as his yearly homage to you, as a gift. The finest gift he can give."

His grin was answer enough, but the lord said, "I will have her immediately. As soon as she can be brought." The messenger bowed and panted and grinned, as though this simple news was too much for him. "She is in a chamber in the Undergrounds just a few miles from here, lord. She can be here in less than an hour."

"Fifteen minutes."

"Of course!"

The meek boy was gone and the room was silent. The calming incense and warmth of the room only made the lack of noise seem more ominous. Still the Lord of the Land of Rain stared at the painting, at a female so _ungodly _fair and he dared not tear his eyes away for fear that the painting suddenly become some illustration of a common lusty courtesan.

Courtesans. _Whores _was what they were, what they would look like in comparison to this…this perfect specimen, this flower. No matter what his outward appearance showed, Pein was just over thirty-one years old, and in all those years he'd never laid his eyes on a female so faultlessly beautiful.

Karin, one of the two expensive courtesans, must have leaned to the side slightly from her spot on the other side of the chamber to see the scroll he held. "She's a great beauty, my lord. How lucky you are, to have one so stunning and so young. So unique!" she said fawningly, but he knew from experience with Karin and all those females like her that she was thinking the exact opposite.

"She is." he agreed, pretending he didn't know her thoughts. "It is a sin I do not have her. A sin against the Lord of Rain. A sin against the gods. She belongs with me."

That little speech must have aroused the other courtesan—Ino, the one he always thought slightly more lusty and pathetic—as he heard her make a little mewling sound in her throat. Wishing those words had been meant for her, no doubt. A most pointless and laughable wish.

"Of course," and he rolled up the scroll, being tender and gentle as possible with the delicate parchment, "being a lord requires that one be a gentleman. And gentlemen know how to share to some extent. I may just be compelled to share her with Sasori and Kakashi, perhaps Naruto, or even Itachi, if they can behave themselves like civilized humans for once."

When he turned around and glared at Ino and Karin they flinched expectedly. He was used to the reaction and ignored it. "Leave me. Now. Return to your private chambers and await some of my shinobi. They'll have a night with you."

He could feel their disappointment wavering in the air, but they bowed to him, low as possible, and left without meeting his eyes. Karin closed the door behind them, and once she did Pein went to each corner of the room and blew out the burning incense and candle flames. The room cooled. The air moving around the room through the fresh air canals now made a refreshingly cool breeze.

Here in his cooled chamber, where courtesans danced for him, he would wait for Genma Onimusha to bring him the green-eyed maid. The green-eyed maid who appeared as frail as a leaf in winter, yet could bring down monster after monster in the Undergrounds.

And Pein couldn't help wondering, sleepily, how in the world she could have lived in Genma Onimusha's section of the Undergrounds, the section where he rarely visited, where none of the lords visited for no particular reason. Why did the gods hide such a gorgeous flower from him, from all the lords, for so many years?

This also brought on the question of her origin: where did she come from? Was she really native to the Land of Rain, his land, or did she just wander across the border from the Land of Sound? Of course, that question couldn't be answered. Few people anywhere across the world knew their origins, why they were farmers and not blacksmiths or carpenters and not horse breeders.

Like thousands or perhaps millions more, Sakura's origins were unknown and would more than likely remain unknown.

666

My fist comment is: Get used to the POV change. It's going to stay in third person. The last chapter will have Sakura telling the story by using "I" and "me." Second comment, probably more important, is that I'm not going to apologize for making sex a big part of the lords' lives. It's supposed to make them more despicable as antagonists, yeah?

Third comment: Courage the Cowardly Dog rocks all you guys' socks. It rocks them completely off your feet. Fourth comment, you ask? Well, I don't have one. I don't think I can say much more except "well this eleven-page chapter is really short in comparison to most of my other stories…" Now then, here's a list of which lord rules over which land. Yes, I chose Kakashi over Deidara, but I promise to incorporate Deidara somewhere. Good guy or bad guy, I don't know yet.

_Pein – Rain_

_Naruto – Leaf_

_Sasori – Sand_

_Itachi – Sound_

_Kakashi – Stone_

Ta…Storm.


	3. Sweetest Rapture Is Sour

So, hey, random comment on the process of publishing a novel. It's hard. Competitive. Long. Evil. If you ever want to publish even a poem that you wrote, prepare for hella rejection. I wrote a dang novel, the first in a fantasy series, and my dad and his author friend are going to help me, and I know I'm probably going to get fifteen rejection letters before some agent or publisher or editor says, "I like this story, I'll take it!" Even Tolkien's books got rejected, about thirty times. (This might be another author I'm thinking of, but anyway it's very common to get a whole bunch of rejections.) I'm just saying this because I know there are teens who want their books to be on the shelves for others to read, and this paragraph may prepare them a bit.

I'm typing this chapter because I don't feel like writing anything else. The reason I don't feel much like writing is because of a family problem. On top of this family problem we havw weird-shit problems that no one but us ever gets. Like, our dog's nails keep bleeding and the garage door is bent and there are ants in my mom's bathroom sink.

Back on topics that you actually care about. Strange how I don't want to write anything at all but this story is always "yeah, sure I'll write some" no matter what. That's pretty good, huh?

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At the Information Vault

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Children could be one of three things to the parents, four if one is imaginative. A blessing. Or a curse. Or a target.

A blessing, something to be happy for, to live for. A curse, something to feed and protect and comfort when one hardly had enough food, protection and comfort for oneself; one would give these things to their child but regret the giving soon after. A target for those who couldn't stand to breathe the air and needed to release their anger on something that would react satisfyingly to a blow from a hammer or fist.

So, with these three divisors, there were three main groups of children in the world. The ones who were "blessings" to their parents. The ones who thought playing a game once in a while was good, that there were a few nice things in life, that smiling was sort of enjoyable.

Then there was the group of children whose parents called them "curses." These were often quiet, disappointed little ones who worked their parents' fields and pulled plows and cut wood without much complaint, who asked their parents for things without expecting to receive them, and not understanding when they did receive them.

We can't forget the last division. The "targets." One can guess what these children usually were. Frightened, rabbit-like in that their eyes darted everywhere, expecting danger. They worked without stopping while never looking up at the elder who sternly watched them. They never asked to play games or to have an extra slice of bread or bothered to tell their parents that a thief was in the house. No, for looking that authority figure in the eye was to ask for an injury that would hinder their fieldwork the next day.

Which sort of child would Sakura would have been, had she grown up with a family?

Does it matter?

No. It does not.

_Food that thieves always take before we can harvest it. The nails and hammers, the ones that we use to put up the metal scraps over the windows each night to keep the demons and wolves out. Our sister, who is in the city making money in the brothel each night and living a life that must be good. Those things matter. _

_Now get back to work. We have to finish before sunset. The wolves come down early this time of year._

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April 6th, 3:01 AM

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What perfection. What flawlessness. What beauty. What god had created her? What god had hidden her away from he and the other lords? Likely the same god who thought the lords would enjoy such a sudden and ideal gift this fine April day.

Was it still April?

Pein could remember Hidan coming in the door and saying something about a demon he'd captured. Pein had been much too busy thinking of the new little fairy to answer him. How long had he been thinking about the fairy, sitting here in this chamber and not saying a word?

Far too long. The messenger had said she would be brought to him in fifteen minutes. Hours upon hours must have passed. The messenger was wrong. For that…for that there would be some amount of punishment…bringing in his favorite hound to chew off the boy's ear would do just fine. Until then he had a few miles of underground tunnels to trek through. He had a young maiden to find.

The Lord of the Rain stood up, opened the door of his chamber—turning the knob so swiftly that the pewter was dented in seven places—and ran. With the speed that the gods had granted him when he was twenty-six years of age, he had sped a mile in less than a minute.

When his boot crunched a roach in the darkness of the tunnels, Pein thought he'd crunched a slave's foot under his boot, but thought no more about it through the entire run, because a cockroach's body and a slave's were one and the same in the eyes of a lord.

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April 6th, 2:34 AM (half an hour earlier)

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Why she was refusing the instructor, she didn't know. Then again, perhaps she did. One was only trained in seduction if one was going to seduce a lord or one of his shinobi, or a resident on one of the lord's "chosen villages." Sakura thought immediately that having her spine broken to pieces was a better fate than being forced to seduce anyone associated with one of the lords.

So when the instructor, a tall and obscenely skinny blonde woman, offered her a dress that did not even cover her thighs, Sakura stared the woman blankly in the eyes and said, "I will not."

The instructor stood there, staring blankly as though she hadn't any irritation or fury at all, and said, "If you refuse, I will bring in others to hold you down and undress you, and redress you in this." She held the dress high like some holy artifact, gazing at it in the same way.

At that point, another emotion struck Sakura…a form of defiance she'd never felt before. True, she'd always meant to get out of the Undergrounds, find a lord and kill him, and the door beyond the instructor wasn't far and might not have been guarded, and it was just about the most perfect opportunity she'd ever been presented with, but along with this defiance and elation rising in her there was also a sort of pity, a sort she felt when comforting the poor girls in her cell.

One look in this woman's eyes could tell the entire story: she'd been threatened or beaten into a shell of herself, and wouldn't be able to become angry or hopeful or anything, no matter what. And it sickened Sakura for the thousandth time that the world was in such a state that one person would do this to another.

The defiance mixed in with the pity for the female instructor. Here was a chance to leave the Undergrounds. _'I may not live to see the world above,' _she thought without a hint of fright. _'If I'm to die, I suppose I must die doing something I want to do.' _

So Sakura reached swiftly over the the indecent dress the instructor held and tugged on in, pulling the woman to the side and out of her way. Inadvertently, she had pulled much too hard, and the woman crashed onto a dirty, deteriorating cushion in the corner of the room, and the stuffing that had been creeping out of the thing puffed all over the room. Sakura ran for the door—reminded herself that running through it wasn't the best idea—turned the knob and opened it.

She looked left and right before she absorbed the place the door led to. There were no guards on either side of the dark tunnel, no one for her to fight off. Only a black tunnel, lined with dirt and gravel and lit by the occasional torch, lay before her.

It was only during her beast-fights in the stadiums of the Undergrounds that Sakura felt the rush of power and confidence that came with a battle. This power and confidence came back to her now. She slammed the door shut behind her and ran, bare feet speeding her across the hard tunnel floor.

The killer of demons ran not knowing where she was going, and not caring, because she was enjoying herself in this dangerous thrill ride. She couldn't help but think that after a decade of crying, horrified little girls and cackling demons prepared to rape her, she deserved a smidge of enjoyment.

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April 6th, 2:49 AM

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_Damn _Genma Onimusha. Damn that putrid sewage rat, and damn the fact that the prospect of cutting off the man's hands did not soothe the lord's anger in the least.

Pein, the Lord of the Land of Rain, had ran through miles of underground tunnels to the personal quarters of Genma Onimusha, scared the living hell out of the skinny man who was looking at illustrations of foreign women, and kicked him against the wall. Considering that the walls of any chamber in the Undergrounds, anywhere in the world, was made of stone, the fact that the man's body crunched the rock wall surely meant he'd broken his back. If that wasn't enough, Pein leaned down on one knee to the worthless man's level and murmured, "You promised me your hands

Yet here he was, writhing on the ground, a childish little toothpick sticking out of his mouth which may have been possibly choking him. His illustrations were scattered over the ground and before Genma could take a breath to scream in horror at his cracked spine, the lord had both Genma's hands in one of his.

"The artist who created that illustration takes every living detail he can see and copies it, and if you lie, you offer your hands for me to chop off."

Nails sharpened by the god-given power of chakra were pushing into Genma's wrists. The skin broke. The nails touched bone. The sight of the infamous Lord of Rain had struck the Undergrounds manager into a state not even this horror could break. The sight of the Lord of Rain coming to kill him had cut off his breath.

"I have visited every chamber up to yours, Sir Onimusha. She is not in your section of the Undergrounds. The artist, you say, copied every _living detail _of the little goddess and yet I can't find a trace of this _living detail. _Surely if she was in any of these rooms that you control, I would have found her by now…"

The nightmare that plagued Genma, that plagued any resident of the Land of Rain, came true: the lord himself was here to kill him. This horror bore down on him with a worse reality than any nightmare, and Genma was struck out of his stupor. He reared his head back, finally felt Pein's nails scraping against his bare bone, and felt his death coming closer by the second, and cried out.

The sound was scratchy, high-pitched and pitiable. There was no one to pity Genma but Pein, who would not offer such a thing to a perverted rat such as Genma.

"She's—She's in the roomattheoppositeendofthehalllllll!"

"Don't talk so fast, I hardly caught any of that," Pein admonished playfully in the manner of a kind father to a son. "She's where now?"

"The room…_at…the…other…end…of…_the hall. Uhnn…" Genma Onimusha was losing consciousness. Pein would allow no such thing. He twisted his nails in the man's flesh, scraping against more bone, pulling against more flesh, tearing more skin. Genma's body thrashed uselessly.

"Oh, but I checked there. I checked every room in the vicinity of your control. I saw no pink-haired young warrior." Genma's eyes went wide and the pupils vibrated, pulsing unnaturally. "In that room…opposite end of the hall…was there a blonde woman there? Was she lying on the ground?"

Pein's attention was caught. "Yes." Genma cried out again, trying to pull away from the lord's grasp but to no avail, naturally. Tears, fat, womanly tears, spilled out of his eyes. "Attila! Attila should have been with her! Not Attelli! Attelli is weak! The girl got away from Atteli! The escort…didn't hear me correctly! He assigned the wrong…the wrong—" The rest of the man's words were lost, for he was crying too loudly to be understood.

He had reason to cry. He could foresee the lord giving him death in under a minute. This was supported by the fact that Pein's nails had stopped digging and wiggling in the flesh of Genma's wrists. The powerful man was much too quiet now.

The flawless warrior-maiden was gone, because of a most stupid error made on Genma's and his escort's part. The warrior-maiden had gotten away, and was now running through the endless tunnels of the Undergrounds. These tunnels spanned the length of the continent. Some went under the oceans. Some crossed over the entire world before returning to the original point. She could be lost forever because of Genma Onimusha.

He was staring at the cracked stone wall, picturing her, a maiden whose eyes of emerald were alight with a fire that could be compared only to the most vicious and relentless wildfires, whose speed could be compared only to that of a diving falcon and her strength to that of a furious bear, whose hair was completely unnatural, the color of…well, there wasn't anything the lord knew of, besides the occasional and odd rose, that was pink.

While thinking this, his hand closed tighter and tighter against Genma's wrists until the bones themselves began to crack and split. Pein was far too lost in his thoughts of a unique female warrior to hear Genma's screams. When the hands were eventually severed and fell to the lord's feet, and the crying, shouting victim was left with two bleeding and bony stumps, he did not care.

Pein did not even care when the blood, both from the severed hands and the stumps of hands, spattered onto the top of his boot. No, he did not so much as glance down at the substance that Genma had dared to use to dirty him. This may have been what forced Genma's sobs to die down in volume.

It didn't matter. Pein left the man to cry and pity himself, and was sprinting along at the speed of a fleeing antelope down the nearest tunnel. His maiden could be anywhere by now. The gods only knew how long she'd been away from her escort and the blonde woman, Attelli. The gods only knew how long it would take for him to find her.

The search for her went on a half hour at least, far away from the section of the Undergrounds that Genma—_had—_ruled over, and into the territory of another Undergrounds manager. Pein may have been outside his kingdom. He may have crossed the border into the Land of the Sound, where Itachi Uchiha ruled. If one of Itachi's shinobi or Undergrounds managers captured the girl, Sakura, before he did, then he would have to pay handsomely to have her back. And Itachi would likely take his sweet time before returning her.

Pein had the sense that the tunnels had taken him both up and down, deeper into the earth's crust and closer and closer to the surface and fresh air. What depth he was at now, he didn't know and didn't care. What only mattered was his anxiety.

What if he never found the young maiden? _Impossible. If shinobi were called to the task, she wouldn't possibly be able to hide or run for long. _What if some unknowing servant of another Undergrounds manager killed her? _Then the punishment would last the rest of their lifetime. Sodomy by knives and hungry maggots would not even be the beginning._

He turned a corner and—there! Running towards him, bloodied turquoise gown fanning behind her, eyes flaming and hair flowing—the maiden was within sight. She continued on a collision course with Pein, who had stopped to view the stunning beauty that Genma's hired artist had failed to copy. She raised a fist towards him, and for the first time in his three decades of life, the lord experienced something quite akin to…an emotion he'd never named.

Sakura had raised her left fist in preparation to strike him. Her eyes were positively glowing with green fire. Within her, beyond her, before her, could it have been a trick of his eyes? No. Without a doubt, as Sakura sped on towards him with a raised and dangerous fist, he saw the spirit of a lean, golden-furred lioness reaching for him with her claws poised to kill. The lioness' roar and Sakura's pounded his eardrums.

The lioness' huge, clawed paw and Sakura's tiny and unmistakably chakra-filled fist slammed into his collarbone at once. The lord both felt and heard the bone snapping under the force. He was knocked onto his back, and Sakura sidestepped him without glancing at him again. He heard her furiously swift footfalls as she dashed away out of his sight. Had blood not been pouring up his throat, demanding to be coughed out, and had the strike not suddenly disorientated him, Pein would have been sprinting in the fashion of a madman to catch her. But he could not bring himself to move. The girl's strike, or perhaps the strike of the phantom lioness, or both, had rendered him immobile for the next several minutes.

Perhaps it was the girl's _chakra _that was keeping him down. Chakra was an energy within a person, that they could use to run at a speed that would shame the pronghorn antelope, and crush tree trunks with one hand. Only the gods could grant it, and they only granted it to lords and their shinobi. How in the _hell _had this unknown little girl acquired it?

The same place she'd acquired the spirit of a lioness, mayhap? The same place she'd acquired the nerve to punch a lord so hard he was slammed onto his back? The same place where she killed a demon every day with her bare hands? Yes. That same place. The Undergrounds.

That young lioness was going to be brought to him. Before he could pursue her any farther, his shinobi had to be informed. The other lords had to be informed. This would mean the entire world would be informed of this one little girl.

'_Perfect.' _he thought with an irrepressible and feline purr. _'All the sooner, she'll be found, safe and…cared for.' _

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April 6th, 4:21 AM

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Air! Air! Fresh, cold, bitterly cold and given by the gods from the sky _air! _

Sakura had known the second she'd turned that last, thousandth corner and felt the breeze. She hadn't felt such a breeze since before she'd been captured by the strange men as a child. She remembered it with a quiet awe, knowing she would save her delighted screaming for later, if she had any energy to waste on such a thing. Above her there had been a stone staircase, unused for months. Her small feet had stirred dust and crushed tiny bugs as she sped up the steps, heedless of her stressed lungs and pained, numbing feet. There had been a light canopy of grass and reeds at the end, to hide the staircase from others seeing it on the outside, but Sakura pushed this away without a thought.

And here she was. Standing on grass, true, green grass and breathing in fresh air and seeing trees and puddles and marsh and fog and the _moon_—oh, the moon. So beautiful it was. Any joyous screaming Sakura had planned was gone from her mind. The moon was so serene and perfect. Was it right, was it decent to dance like a cheery lunatic under the silent, stately moon?

She decided not. Sakura felt a little splash of pride for doing such a thing: respecting the moon's beauty, being quiet as she jogged away from the hidden staircase. She smiled to herself as she moved swiftly up a rocky ridge to avoid the mud of the marsh that would doubtlessly hold her down.

The young girl hadn't a crumb of food to speak of—though the muddy marsh would offer fine drinking water—and not even a knife to defend herself with from the demons, rabid animals and thieves that came out at night. It _was _night, but the sun would rise within another two hours or so, and Sakura felt sure her will and her vigorously trained body would be enough to protect her until she gathered her bearings in the morning.

Till then, the girl with no food and no weapons but herself traveled on through an unknown landscape, unknowing of anything that lay before her, and not caring. The moon above her, nearly full, shone through the fog and the sight of it kept her smiling. And that was enough for now.

666

Nice ending, I'd say. Quite hopeful for such a sucky world. This chapter is only eight pages, barely half of my usual chapter length, but I did say this story would probably have short chapters so this may become normal. Deal with it.

I'm also feeling glad I included Pein here. I like Pein's looks, "I-are-god" personality. I also enjoy Sakura-Older man pairings, I don't know why. All the lords here are older than her, and you know almost for sure she's going to triumph over these older, more powerful men eventually but _how _just totally escapes you. At least that's how your thought process should be going right now.

No more comments can be inserted because even though my summer break has started, I must wake up early to meet the guy who's going to fix our dented garage track. Don't ask. My mom and me have funky problems and they suck.

Ta…Storm


	4. Hark The Herald Devils Scream

My family problem is turning around but it's still very…un-nice. I've been offered a chance to live in Europe for the remainder of my high school time, but for personal reasons I really can't go and I'm not really sure if I'd want to or not anyway. So far I'd rather not go but turning down the person who gave me this offer is going to be tough. And as calm and cool as I seem I'm quite gutless and cowardly. Can't even ask a stranger what time it is without having my heart pound. Turning down the offer and giving the reasons for it…shall not be nice.

So what do I do to avoid that? Write, of course. And play Pokemon. If you didn't know I used to have the most kickass Crystal version with the most amazing things on it. Three Charizards, one of each Eevee evolution, a level 100 Nidoking, a 94 Typhlosion, among many others and in summer of '07 the data died and all my amazing stuff went kaput. Now FireRed is my version of awesomeness and I'm pretty happy because I got me a _Tyranitar _and he rocks. His name is Spaedeth.

Ain't you glad I spend only two paragraphs on my personal life and several pages on a Naruto fanfiction? Of course. I can only imagine what _you're _avoiding while reading this.

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At the Information Vault

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"_Mother and Father were the only ones who knew how to put up the metal over the windows."_

"_I know."_

"_How will we put them up tonight? There are latches and locks and things…and your hand's not working."_

"_It will get better. Tonight it will be better and we'll figure out how to lock the metal scraps over the windows. You, me and Tressa."_

"_Your hand won't get better. The fingers have been turning purple ever since you touched that weird red plant. And Tressa's a baby. She can't even hold a hammer." _

"_We'll do it somehow, Reeno. Mother and Father taught me a lot before they went to heaven. I remember almost everything they told me."_

"_Where will we bury them?"_

"_We won't. There's too many crops to carry into the house and we won't have time. And the wolves will leave us alone tonight and maybe tomorrow, too, if we give them Mother and Father. There are only about four, and if they're really starving they can't eat a whole lot at once, so they should have full bellies for awhile."_

"_Our parents are going to be wolves' feed."_

"_Yes."_

"_Will we watch the wolves take them away?"_

"_Do you want to?"_

"_No."_

"_Then we won't. Do you want to go inside, Reeno? It's warmer in there, and I put some new hay in your pillow today."_

"_Yes…But…I wondered…I wondered this for awhile…should we give Tressa to the demons? Mother said we should. She never eats and never cries and never moves...never smiles, either. She just breathes and lays there. I wonder if she's in pain but she's too weak to cry."_

"_It might be best if we did that, but the demons wouldn't take her. Demons like prey that screams. Wolves would eat her if we put her out there, or the wildcats. Or some of the thieves, maybe. They eat people if they're hungry enough." _

"_Not like us. We have crops."_

"_Some. Enough to live."_

"_You wouldn't eat me, would you, brother? I wouldn't eat you."_

"_If there was no food for either of us, I would feed Tressa to the wolves so she doesn't have to starve. And I'd _make _you eat me, Reeno. I'd make you or I'd kill you and then kill me, too. You're a strong boy. You could eat me, and find a band of thieves. If you beat one of them in a fight or kill one of them, they let you into their group, that's how they work. And you could live that way."_

"_But I would keep a little piece of you with me, brother. If I really, really had to eat you, I would save a piece, like a little bit of your hair, or one of your bones, and keep it with me always."_

"_No, Reeno. That's disgusting."_

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April 6th, 8:33 AM

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Young Sakura had been walking a good few hours, and she was incredibly lucky to have not encountered any wild animals or demons or thieves. Such things were typically nighttime affairs and now that the sun was up—a sight at which Sakura gladly shed tears and laughed—she had a good chance of being out of the worst dangers of the world.

A demon, or a pack of demons—the guards in the Undergrounds sometimes talked of demons above ground walking, eating and killing in packs—was her only fear. A band of thieves was nothing when she had killed monsters every day of her life. Wolves and wildcats and bears were nothing but low-class demons in Sakura's mind.

The only thing that set demons apart was their particular ugliness, and of course their desire to rape. Male or female, a demon was born with a lusty instinct to reproduce with any creature they could find, and once that was done with they had an instinct to feed, and then to reproduce and then to feed…over and over and over again. Demons did nothing but sleep, eat and rape. Sakura had taken down a group of three demons more than once in her fights in the Undergrounds. Three she could handle.

Four, possibly. Five or more…no. That would be her end. Impregnated by a nightmare creature, or perhaps more than one nightmare creature, and eaten alive after a two-day gestation period by her offspring. So went the fate of any female creature impregnated by a demon.

Thankfully, demons didn't really like the daylight. Hurt their beady little eyes, it did. So the threats were narrowed down to cannibalistic, lusty thieves and bloodthirsty bears, wolves and wildcats. It wasn't summer, the season of storms, so she didn't even have to worry about being blown away by tornadoes or drowned by sudden floods. All of these things Sakura was decently confident she could handle.

And she was only thinking of things that could haunt her in the daylight. She never usually looked that far into the future—taking down the lords, or just one lord, was a goal to be achieved if many other little goals happened to fall into place. For now, her goal was to find a safe place to shelter, preferably a tree so that if she slept into the night the only demons that could attack her were skinny and weak tree-climbers, which required only a well-aimed kick to dispose of.

If she lived through the night, then she'd set up another goal: live through the next day and hopefully the next night. If anything interesting happened in that time, something that needed to be done, then it would be another goal to be achieved.

Sakura considered herself to be a very patient, mellow sort of female. If violence was required, that was all well and good exercise, and whatever was the recipient of her violence would likely be a ne'er-do-well creature that would be better off dead, so violence in Sakura's case would always be a favor to the Earth. If violence was not required, then her modest and practical side would quietly rule her soul.

The modest, patient and practical side of the young maiden became tinged with curiosity. For she had been walking along the top of a long rise, and at the bottom of the hill, far off and nearly on the horizon, she could see a cottage made of logs. There was a little square of dirt in front of it, a garden, and here a young woman was toiling. The woman was perhaps a decade older than Sakura.

Immediately, out of instinct, Sakura felt a small respect growing in her. This woman, older than she, had the will and power to own her own home and garden and maintain it however difficult it might be. (And of course Sakura couldn't help but respect the woman for simply being older than her, for almost all females she'd seen in the Undergrounds had lived in her cell with her, and nearly all had been younger than she, and all had been killed.)

'_I must show her I mean no harm.' _Sakura told herself. _'Perhaps if I feign injury, she will think I'm no threat. I must at least learn where I am, what land I am in, and if I can…find out where the nearest lord's castle is.' _

Wearing the same gown she typically wore in her Undergrounds battles, a bloodied turquoise dress hanging almost to her knees, and with a body covered in scratches and a head of tousled hair, surely she posed no threat.

Sakura made her way down the hill, hardly giving any notice of the sharp pebbles digging into her bare feet, and walked towards the woman with the house and the garden.

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April 6th, 8:35 AM

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"I hope this _little pink goddess _is raped by a demon pack." Karin whispered to her companion, Ino.

Both were above ground, no longer in the Undergrounds, and stood on a flat piece of grassy land with the Lord of Rain and a dozen or so of his shinobi. The Lord of Leaf, weeks ago, had sent a message that he planned to visit his friend, Pein, and show him something new he'd discovered in his own kingdom of Leaf. The fact that Lord Naruto was arriving just in time to hear of the hours-old news of the "pink little goddess" was pure coincidence. Pein was taking full advantage of this coincidence, and planned to tell Naruto exactly what had gone on in the past few hours. His shinobi were needed to track her down.

Karin and Ino, as the highest-ranked courtesans of the lord, were standing many meters behind Pein—this was closer than even his most trusted shinobi—in their finest gowns of ruby-red silk. Wide neckholes, frills and beads and tempting cleavage combined with white slippers of demon bone and powdered makeup on their faces made them tantalizing subjects. The shinobi who stood on the lord's left and right had trouble not turning their heads to look at them.

"I hope she already _has _been raped." Ino agreed, running delicate fingers through her perfect blonde ponytail. "So much fuss over this one girl. If she was a courtesan or even a street whore I would understand, I suppose,"—Karin nodded her zealous agreement—"but she's not even _that. _Why would any lord want a girl from the Underground rings? She'll probably be about as civil as a rabid horse."

Fresh wind blew up the girls' skirts and they pushed them down again, giggling like spoiled or giddy children. Two or three shinobi could not resist glancing at them with lust in their eyes, but returned their gazes to the horizon a moment later, fearful for their lives. (The punishment for gazing lustily at a lord's courtesan had never been set. It depended upon the mood of the lord himself.)

"Well, spring is here and mating season's abound for all the animals," Karin said gleefully. "Demons are notoriously, er, evil around springtime. I think there's a very good chance of her being a victim around these months."

"Eaten by her own little babies," Ino gushed, closing her eyes in bliss. "Assuming the babies don't rape her. Disgusting creatures, makes me want to retch. Well, if they do, I'll bet they got the habit from their mother." Both women giggled, covering their mouths.

"Sshh, shhh!" Karin waved her hand over Ino's face. "Here comes Lord of the Leaf."

And so he was. Naruto, age twenty-five, was the youngest of the lords and had a face of a boy several years his junior, courtesy of lifelong, literally god-given youth. He was famous, or, infamous, for the six scars on his face in the shape of whiskers. These scars were given to him by a young wildcat that attacked him at age four. In a fit of unhealthy rage, Naruto latched his little teeth onto the cat's ear and chewed and pulled until the appendage came off in his mouth and the cat rand away screeching. And so those six scars from the wildcat's claws would remain on the lord's face for all his life.

What also made this lord famous, besides being the youngest of all five, was that he was the only one of the five current lords to have risen to place through birthright. The lord before him, Lord Minato, had been his father, and the father loved his son—he loved no one else—enough to give him an entire country to rule before a sickness took his life.

Naruto had been ruling since his seventeenth birthday, and since then numerous shinobi and even non-shinobi had tried to assassinate him to no avail. His chakra, which he liked to built up in the form of an orange, raging fox he nicknamed Kyuubi, was simply too powerful. Even when he did not try to formulate the chakra into an attack, sending pure chakra into an enemy was enough to stop enemies' hearts and rip away their skin.

And the young lord couldn't help but grin some while he watched his would-be assassins melt into a pile of bones. Because it was quite silly that they'd tried to kill him, Lord of the Leaf, and expected…something _positive _to happen!

All this information ran through the minds of Pein, his shinobi and his two courtesans as they watched Naruto approach, backed by four shinobi. All were riding black creatures. Black _flying, winged _creatures.

"Lord…he's riding a demon." murmured Kakuzu, one of Pein's highest-ranked shinobi. "Looks a lot like a horse, but with wings and…some extra eyes. You think perhaps he'd been breeding demons?"

Pein made a thoughtful noise as the wind whipped his black cloak. "I think you are exactly right, Kakuzu. Breeding demons. He would have to cross a demon with a fine mare or filly. That little blonde rat probably watched the mating process, too. Disgusting, insolent brat he is. Same as his father."

Pein said these condescending things softly, admiringly, for all lords were decent friends with one another, and no matter how hormonal or pathetically adolescent Naruto acted, Pein would always enjoy the stupid company of the blonde.

The wings of Naruto's black creatures flapped slowly, for the wings were proportionately gigantic in comparison to the horse-sized creature's body. With slow flaps they descended to the ground, a good five meters from Pein and his own shinobi.

Two of the blonde lord's shinobi leapt from the backs of their steeds and raced to the side of their lord's. They went down on their knees and made a pair of stair-steps, for one was larger and taller than the other. Naruto, humming with his eyes relaxingly closed, swung his leg over his steed's side and both feet slammed down on the back of one shinobi. He was there for a good moment or three, standing on the back of his loyal shinobi, not seeing of course how the lesser man's knees and arms trembled.

Then he stepped and his boot descended on the smaller man's back, the lower step. This man was older than the taller, larger man who was the first step, and unfortunately for him, his age showed in the fact that he was contracting a sickness. When Naruto's foot went down on the man's back, a joint audibly cracked and one could tell the man was trying not to make a pained sound. Naruto did not seem to notice and he stepped off the second-step man and onto the ground. From here he made his way over to Pein, holding a green bottle in his right hand.

"How goes life, old living pincushion? Can't be bad if it's your turn to have Ino and Karin. Unlike me, you're prob'ly sleeping well because of them." The aforementioned living pincushion, complete with about two dozen piercings on his body, only blinked. The aforementioned Ino and Karin were blushing so much their pale makeup appeared to be fading.

"Yeah, you probably guessed because you're old and smart and shit, but I got this idea to breed demons with horses to make the best steeds you've ever seen, and then breed the offspring of the horse and demon with some kind of bird, and the offspring of _that _is a horse with wings! Are you listening to me, Pein? You don't look like you're listening. You look drugged. Come on now, give me some kind of expression, blank-face! I rode here, I flew here, on a damned _pegasus." _

While saying these things, Naruto's black pegasus was walking over to the two lords. It stopped just near them, with its left side facing them as though it wanted someone to ride it. Naruto slapped the demon's bony flank. "I came here to show you so you could do this, too. Riding a horse-drawn carriage to get from one part of your land to another takes so fucking long. After you, I'm gonna show this to Kakashi."

The pegasus-like demon raised its horse-shaped head and moaned. Karin and Ino squealed fearfully and rushed up behind Pein, which was quite counterproductive because to get behind said lord they came closer to the demon. Naruto slapped the thing's flank again and its head lowered.

"You gotta train 'em, too, 'cause when they're born they want to rape and eat and kill things and I'm not riding anything that insane. But it's easier than you'd think." Naruto appeared quite giddy. His eyes were shining, lighting up the dreary, cloudy day. "Demons with tentacles are so common, we can usually just cut off their tentacles until they learn to shut up and obey. This guy here had nineteen when he was born. Now he's got zero and he's as gentle as a baby rabbit. Pet him, Pein, on the neck. He likes that."

The lord of many piercings did exactly that, stroking the creature's thin, black fur with fake gentleness, and the pegasus-demon hummed throatily. "This one's a female." Naruto informed. "I'm thinking about naming her Katon, but I'm not good with names so I figure I'll probably hate that name an hour after I assign it to her. See this bottle here? You have to dump all the liquid on her shoulders once a day or else she smells like a pile of corpses. That's the only downside to my demon steeds, so--"

"Naruto."

"Yah?"

Pein's left arm gave a little spasm, and the scroll he'd been hiding in the sleeve of his cloak fell into his hand. It was tied with green string. "Look at this and tell me what you think, please."

The younger lord laughed. "Well, you said it all polite." He took the scroll, undid the string and unraveled the scroll, holding it up to eye level. Naruto's bright, cheery eyes went dark. "Is this a new courtesan of yours?"

He was holding the painting that Genma's hired artist had painted of Sakura, the same one the adolescent messenger had delivered to him. Sakura was pictured almost straight-on, cherry hair waving, eyes glowing and turquoise gown flowing, lightly slicked with blood. Even somewhat disheveled, smeared in places with blood, wounded and angry, there was no denying that the maiden's beauty was flawless, and likely even more so when she was not dirty with demon blood and sand from the Undergrounds' floor.

"No. She has been kept in Genma Onimusha's section of the Undergrounds for a decade, fighting and killing a demon every day."

"Nobody ever went to Genma's section of the Undergrounds. The fights there were hardly entertaining."

"That was the opinion over ten years ago. Just after it became unpopular, that girl was taken there. Now the only ones who watch the battles there are residents of Flexian, one of my chosen villages. They have a talent for ironworks, and Genma's is the nearest Undergrounds section for them. I have spoken with the village's leader, and he himself has seen the girl fight. Her name is Sakura. He's seen her pick up a fully grown lion and throw it to the other end of the ring."

The younger of the two lords was struck silent for a good minute before his voice returned to him. "Is she still there?" he finally asked. Pein shook his head, and since Naruto's eyes were glued to the illustration, he did not see the vicious want in his elder's eyes. "She escaped, not many hours ago. I attempted to capture her before she got aboveground. I turned a corner. Saw her for but a moment. I was transfixed. That illustration does no justice to her. And she punched me in my collarbone and sped by me."

Still with his eyes on the illustration, Pein reached to unbutton his cloak. He undid the first two and pulled the right side down, revealing to Naruto and the world a dark patch of bruised skin below his neck, coated in dried blood. "She has chakra. There is no doubt. If I didn't have chakra myself, that strike could have been fatal."

"You don't know where she is now?" Naruto was rolling the scroll back up and fumbling with the string, with his eyes on Pein's wound.

"She could be aboveground by now. She could still be moving around in the Undergrounds."

"Those tunnels go all around the _world, _Pein. Even under the ocean. My father told me once that there are nine of them that go to the center of the earth."

"All the more reason for you to lend your shinobi, and the other lords theirs. Naturally, whoever finds her first shall be the first to see her…after me."

Naruto's lip curled. "After you. Only fair, I suppose. But on the vague off-chance that I am _not _first—" he gestured with one finger to Ino and Karin, who blushed sensually again—"I demand I be given those courtesans. I haven't had a turn with them in almost four months."

The two courtesans put them hands over their mouths and giggled with half-closed eyes. They, too had missed the attentions of the Lord of Leaf. When Pein simply nodded and said, "Agreed, Naruto; that is a fair trade," they tried desperately to hide their happiness. Whether or not they succeeded shall never be known, for the lords were not paying attention to them and the shinobi decided it would be best for their well-being not to look at them.

"Then I'm taking Katon and riding to Itachi. We're only about thirty miles from Rain's border with Sound, aren't we? Yes, I knew it. I'll take this illustration and show it to him. Explain things. My pegasus-demon idea came to me at just the right time. If she's aboveground, we'll have an easy time finding her."

Naruto's shinobi had no time to go on their hands and knees to make a pair of stair-steps for their lord. Said lord simply jumped and with the power of chakra aiding him he landed upon his steed's back without any trouble. "I'll keep an eye on the ground while I'm flying!" the blonde called as his demon began trotting away and his other shinobi and steeds followed. "Damn it, Pein, demons or wolves or cannibals could have eaten her by now! Why are you standing there? Do _something _if you want her!"

On command of his friend, Pein turned around without a glance to his courtesans, and walked away. As soon as Ino and Karin turned around to watch his handsome form go, he put on an unnatural burst of speed, and within seconds he was on the horizon, running at a speed that would put away the finest racehorse. It was chakra that allowed him to do this. His shinobi, also chakra-powered, followed him. Two nondescript shinobi grabbed the courtesans, flipped them over their shoulders and carried them after their lord.

Two of the five rulers of the earth knew of the lost little warrior. After another two days or so, after Naruto and his flying demon steeds had passed the news to Sasori, Itachi and Kakashi, all rulers of the earth would know, and would be looking for her.

It was much more fortunate that Sakura did not know.

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I wanted to write more, but I promised shorter chapters for this story, and it's late and I want to see if I can get in another chapter of MarySewage before I go to bed. I'm finding my summer to be strangely boring. Usually I'm perfectly happy to just sit and play video games and watch movies and walk my dog but now that seems not as fun as it was last summer. I look at the clock and wonder if I should do more and wonder if I really _want _to do more or if this is boredom without reason. I don't really know what to do about it.

Onto the story…well, you should have noticed the many references to demon-rape in this chapter. Good. I felt that besides the rape references, this chapter wasn't nearly as depressing. That's why I changed the first section to a heartfelt dialogue, of a young boy named Reeno and his unnamed older brother, talking about what to do now that their parents have suddenly died and their baby sister is only half-alive.

Quick note here: the chapter title is confusing, and originally I meant for them only to apply to the top section of each chapter, the "despressing things about this universe for your reading pleasure" section. But this chapter title is saying that the "Herald Devils" (lords, specifically Naruto and Pein) are now "screaming" for something, namely Sakura. So that's the explanatory section of this note.

Writing about and for Pein is fun. I like him. Now that I'm spending a little time looking at the guy to inspire the old writing machine I realize that he's pretty damn handsome with the piercings and hair color and the unforgettable "Me equals god" personality. Even my _mother _thinks so. And besides the fact that along with braces I have to wear a rubber band in my mouth so be glad _you_ don't have braces…that's it for now.

Ta…Storm


	5. Ugly Ornaments To Hang

Strange how I put out three chapters of different fanfictions within a few days of each other and then posted nothing for days and days but a quick chapter to my Pokemon story. I've been rediscovering Transformers. The old, original cartoon where it all began. I've been so into it, I've barely touched any of my fanfictions and this chapter is probably going to be typed in small paragraph-long sections. We'll see.

Hey, in decently interesting news, I daydreamed up a fantastic scene for this story that is sort of inspiring me to write despite the Transformers high in my brain, in hopes that I will be able to write that awesome scene ever sooner. It won't be in this chapter, possibly the next one, but if not the next one then the one after that. Must write. Must not think of Starscream and Soundwave and Ratchet and so many other awesome characters…

Oh, the song in this chapter is straight out of one of the darkest little kids' movies in existence. Guess it if you can.

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At the Information Vault

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Holidays usually meant one thing to the people of the world: songs. If families lived close enough together, they would all gather in one house for the day, and sing songs of that holiday and gather all their positive, uplifting tales together and tell them all at once.. It was not that different if one lived in a chosen village.

A chosen village was one that the lord of that land chose himself to be protected from demons and thieves, a village where people were properly fed and could laugh and smile all the time, for they had almost nothing to fear except the wrath of the lord should they not supply him with whatever he asked. And most often, the village was perfectly capable of supplying, for they were chosen for their ability to do so. If a lord liked silk, he had a village of weavers at his side. On holidays in chosen villages, people would listen to music played by groups of musicians. They would fall asleep with their windows open, to catch the sound of the music being played through the night, and they would have lovely dreams.

Point being, my friends, that even in the happy and cozy chosen villages, people sang and chatted on holidays. The songs, though, were rarely joyful. Songwriters were notorious for choosing their occupation because they needed an outlet for their grief; it was not an occupation most would choose willingly.

The most famous piece, written by someone unknown, was sung on all three holidays of the year for countless decades. Legend has it that the writer had lost his wife to a mysterious disease, and he fell into songwriting immediately after. His most famous piece went thusly:

"_Come out moon  
Come out wishing star  
_

_Come out, come out…  
Wherever you are_

_I'm out here in the dark  
All alone and wide awake  
Come and find me.  
I'm empty and I'm cold  
And my heart's about to break,  
Come and find me  
I need you to come here and find me  
'Cause without you I'm totally lost  
I've hung a wish on every star  
It hasn't done much good so far  
I can only dream of you  
Wherever you are…_

_I'll hear you laugh  
I'll see you smile  
I'll be with you  
Just for a while_

_But when the morning comes  
And the sun begins to rise  
I will lose you  
Because it's just a dream  
When I open up my eyes  
I will lose you  
I used to believe in forever  
But forever's too good to be true  
I've hung a wish on every star  
It hasn't done much good so far  
I don't know what else to do  
Except to try to dream of you  
And wonder if you are dreaming too  
Wherever you are, wherever you are."_

666

April 6th, 8:55 AM

666

It had taken longer than Sakura thought to get to the home of the woman with the garden, mostly due to the tiny bits of rock that enjoyed poking themselves into the scars on her feet and needed to be brushed away every two minutes. All the same, after about fifteen or twenty minutes, she was here, within sight of the woman and her home.

The home appeared to be made of a mixture of metal pieces and carved logs, stuck together wherever they could fit. Up close it looked much sloppier than it had on the far-off hill before. But Sakura needed answers to her questions before she could go on. If she asked politely, perhaps offered to help the woman with her gardening, perhaps she would get these answers.

She was walking slowly with her hands casually at her sides as she walked closer to the woman. She could only guess what a sight she looked, wearing a bloodied and torn dress, walking barefoot with scarred feet—and her unusual hair color would probably not help convince the woman she was a just simple young girl.

When the former Undergrounds fighter was about thirty feet from the gardening woman, said woman snapped her head up to look at Sakura. Her hair was long, wavy and black, and she was dressed in a tunic that appeared to be made of bandages. One of the sleeves had been torn away. The garden was hardly in better shape. Out of the six rows of plants, only a single row had anything green growing within. All others held browning, dry sticks of dead life.

"What do you want?" the woman boomed, raising her gardening hoe up defensively. Sakura held up her hands as though surrendering. "I-I only want—"

"Whatever you want, I don't have!" the woman interrupted shrilly. "I have no husband for you to take away from me. He is gone, and I have no children, no food, no treasures! If you think a pile of hay is a treasure, then you may take that! It's hardly worth sleeping on—so infested with _rats_!"

Sakura stared. "I don't want any of those things." Hoping to be conversational, doing her best at talking—which was poor at best—she said, "What…happened to your husband, ma'am?"

The woman clenched her fingers tightly over the hoe. "A group of women came and took him away while he was working in the garden. They threatened my life if I went after him. They could have used him for pleasure, they could have eaten him, they could have taken his clothes and his tools and left him to die—he is gone now and that is all I know. That is all I can afford to care about."

And there was nothing Sakura could say to this. Surely the woman would once again become loud and defensive if Sakura so much as offered sympathy. All she could do was go straight to the point of her coming here. "I, uh…I came here because I have no idea where I am. It would mean very much to me if you could tell me the name of the land I am in, and perhaps what part of the land as well."

Cold laughter was her answer. Tapping the hoe against the ground in a manner that seemed impatient, she replied, "Why don't you go and find a village and ask the folk there? If you offered the brothel a body like yours, someone would eventually be polite enough to tell you something."

Unfortunately, the only villages Sakura knew of were the few chosen villages, which were protected by stone walls and shinobi, and the likelihood of finding one of those was small. If there were other villages, then they must deal with demon attacks and thief raids almost every night. How the village could stand up long enough to be called a village was something curious Sakura could only guess.

Thinking of this, Sakura ignored the fact that the woman was telling her with no politeness to get off her property. Ignoring that with some amount of sadness, the girl only said, "I will help you with your garden if you would only tell me what land this is. The answer to this one question is all I need."

Again her response was laughter, mocking and pitiful. The fact that the woman appeared to greatly dislike her did not bother Sakura in the least, not nearly as much as the fact that this woman's only food supply was dying and yet she was here laughing.

"Fine. You on the edge of the border of the Land of Rain. A few miles that way—" she pointed in the direction Sakura had come from—"is the Land of Sound. And several hundred miles that way—" the woman pointed behind herself and her house—"on the opposite border of Rain, is Stone. And beyond that, the ocean. And it would please me if you would go drown yourself over there and leave me to my work." Promptly she spared Sakura not another glance and began moving a dirt pile with her hoe.

For a good two or three minutes, the girl stood there, some thirty feet away from the woman and her garden, and watched her pointlessly arrange soil around the small green stalks that remained among the dead ones. It took some two or three seconds to realize that the woman was starving, and she contemplated this for the rest of the two or three minutes.

Firstly, the plants would take many weeks to grow, and by then, unless the woman could hunt some animal in the dark meadows surrounding her home, she would die of starvation. Her home looked close to both rusting and collapsing in on itself. Her clothes were soiled with dirt and dust and her hair appeared as though it hadn't been combed in days. She was dying.

Sakura wondered if she should feel sympathy for this woman. She wanted to, but it appeared that her sympathy and her presence were both highly unwanted. Honoring the woman's desires and ignoring her own, she shoved all empathy to the back of her mind and channeled only respect.

"I'm Kurenai." the woman said after Sakura had stood in that one spot for several minutes. "There, now go tell the leader of your thief group my name so he knows who to ambush. When you come to rob my home tonight, there won't be anything here, anyway, unless you want to feed my infested hay to a horse." Sakura winced briefly. For all her attempts to be kind to this woman, she was assuming anyway Sakura was a member of a common thief gang.

"And I've been carrying black fever in me for weeks. If you stuff your cannibal faces with my flesh or attempt to rape me, you'll only die yourselves." With a final, harsh slam of the hoe into the ground, Kurenai said, "You've been warned. Now get your fermenting carcass off my property, girl, and put it back in the brothel where it belongs. I'm sure there's a wrinkled old aristocrat who'll pay you something decent for it."

Nodding was all she could do, though Kurenai probably didn't see her do it anyway. Sakura's goal now was to get farther into the Land of Rain, and to do that she must go past Kurenai and her garden. She gave the older woman a wide berth and walked around her. Once she was a small distance beyond the woman Sakura turned her head back and said, "My name is Sakura, by the way."

"I don't care." Kurenai said without looking up. Ignoring her, the maiden said, "I'm going to make this world a little better. I hope you live long enough to notice the change and enjoy it." At this, the black-haired woman stood up and stared. It was a very condescending stare, and Sakura felt slightly embarrassed and ashamed for speaking, so she turned away and began walking again.

With her gardening hoe resting on her shoulder, the woman watched the maiden walk off to the north. She was heading for the wilderness of the land's flat, grassy plains that were ridden with lightning storms and swift wildcats.

Kurenai wished the stupid little girl a quick death and returned to her gardening.

666

April 7th, 4:23 PM

666

"This tunnel must be the center of the earth."

"Close to it, Yamato. The closer to the center you get, the hotter it becomes."

"_Look _at me, Sai! I'm sweating so much, my hair is completely soaked! Would you like to look at my undershirt? And how is it that everyone on this team is sweating but you?"

"A handy ability the gods gave me when I became a shinobi last year. The cold weather isn't for me, but nothing hot, short of a bath in lava, will bother me."

Sai was several years Yamato's junior, but in the ranks of shinobi, the Lord of Leaf's shinobi, he was far superior. Sai wasn't cocky very often, but when he taunted others he taunted them in the worst possible moments and it was enough to make him hated among Naruto's shinobi. Naturally, though, shinobi were bound by sacred law and oath not to go against the orders of their Lord. And all lords decreed that their shinobi not fight amongst themselves.

Thusly, however much Yamato and the other shinobi wanted to shove Sai off a cliff and feed him to sharks, they could not. Naruto would have their heads for it, if he didn't disconnect one of their limbs and force them to go on working.

Young and pale Sai, in front, held up his hand and the half-dozen men—and the two women—of his shinobi team halted immediately, their bodies frozen as a granite statue. All shinobi but Sai had frozen with their hands comfortably near their weapons. With slow movements, Sai took steps forward, black eyes locked on something unseen in the darkness of the tunnel before them.

"It's a large insect." Sai said calmingly, but the shinobi were drawing swords and daggers and powering their bodies with chakra. One of the two female shinobi raised her hand, muttered something that could have been a chant or an irritated curse, and then grunted. A fireball grew before her palm and left it, traveling in the air past the other shinobi and past Sai, towards a scuffling creature near his feet.

The fireball stopped some three feet from the insect, showing it to be a mantis-like beast only just the size of a housecat, colored bluish-grey and coated in a liquid that shone when the fire sparkled over it.

"Shiira, burn that insect immediately. If it's not the little pink girl, then it's not of interest."

Shiira complied and the mantis-creature squealed when its body went up in little flames. The last shinobi in the line tried to avoid stepping on its charred body when he passed. This same shinobi, an intimidating, tall and muscled man, said, "You know if we are near the center of the earth, you think we will see Manda?"

Another shinobi in front of him lashed out his foot and kicked the muscled man in his chest. "Your jokes are disgusting," the kicker spat. The muscled man prodded onward. "The soul of the evil person goes to Manda in hell!" he whispered ominously. "Manda's world is very crowded. It gets more crowded each day. Surely some of the crowds must move above hell to find space to live. What is above hell, Gai? Do you know? Do you know?"

The answer was either rock or the earth's crust depending on how intelligent the speaker was. Sai and his team were far below earth's crust. The tunnels of the Undergrounds went far below earth's crust.

And no child was spared of bedside tales of Manda the snake. The snake who would eat off naughty children's legs and force them to continue walking through the crop fields, and tear out their eyes and force them to continue watching the horizon for wolves.

Was there truly a snake under the earth who lurked and watched for bad children and bad people? Everyone wondered. Every child, every adult, every mother, every father. All they had to do was fill their lives with crime and find out where their soul went afterward.

At night little garden snakes would wander through the gardens of those who were lucky enough to raise good crops. These little snakes ate away at the crops and made sure no family was living a life with enough food enough to be called a life. They burrowed into the dirt for miles and miles uncountable and went back to Manda in his chair of infant human bones. They told Manda how many crops they ate and Manda laughed, and Manda kept count of how many families were starving, and danced and howled when the numbers rose.

This is the bedtime story, the thought that ran through the thoughts of all shinobi on the search team. One or two of them may have wondered if the girl had been in the Undergrounds so long she couldn't remember her parents telling her that story. One or two of them may have wondered if the girl could be called innocent because she didn't know there was a giant snake ruling Hell under her feet.

666

April 12th, 5:01 AM

666

'_I am lucky to have this chance to bathe. I am lucky to have a chance to bathe and get myself clean and make my skin feel good. It will feel so much better when I am done, and when I am clean.' _

Sakura continued to think this as she stood naked in the river, wisely standing at shoulder-depth, running her hands harshly over her skin in the manner of a tough-bristled brush. The dirt and grime and dust came off her skin and her hair became slightly less tangled when the water and her hands both ran through it.

Sakura would use her bare hands to scrub herself, and then would move her hands over the same body part to scrub again, and would peel off the leech that had stuck itself there. Sakura spent as much time bathing as picking at leeches. They sucked at her skin and she could sometimes feel blood moving out of her and into them, and picked them off before the flow became too strong. She did not mind the leeches themselves, the gooey, disgusting feel of them, but the loss of her blood was something that worried her.

In the Undergrounds, after losing blood in a fight, she was given almost an entire day to rest and recuperate before fighting again. Here, in the wilderness, in these flat, stormy grasslands, she must always watch. The flat land could disguise nothing. She would see an oncoming predator in good time, if it was slow. But the lean, strange cats stalking these lands were not slow. They were large and light and fast and hungry and merciless.

Her bath was done. Slowly she crawled closer to shore and pulled her dress into the shallows, rinsing and wringing it like she had seen the Undergrounds guards do with the garments of those who lost fights. Slowly, her turquoise gown lost a good amount of blood, and became decent. The most decent garment she'd seen in a long while.

Leeches were still in her hair from when she had rinsed and attempted to wash it. She picked these out with difficulty and with tears from the pain of pulling on her roots. She picked them off the dress and off her legs and arms and stomach. She picked one off her breast and one off her chin, put on her garment once more, stretched, and began walking, apple in tow.

Apples, mind you, were the only thing that grew in this place. Trees were rare, being seen once every fifteen miles at least, and they were nearly always apple trees. Shelter. High branches to sleep in. Food. _Delicious _food that made young, undernourished Sakura feel content and full like never in her life before.

She wondered if dropping the cores wherever she walked was a bad idea, if leaving a trail wasn't good. Surely it was a bad idea, so she buried them...most of the time. Then again, she thought rebelliously sometimes, anything or anyone following her was obviously victim of a bad idea. If anyone tried to follow her or capture her, she would not hesitate in snapping their neck. They were in the way of her goal to take down a lord. They wouldn't know that, of course, but that was not something she could concern herself with. Anyone who followed her was an enemy. No further thought was needed.

'_This life is very fine. When I'm struggling, I should remember this. I should always try more, try again, to have this life again if I can. Apples. Wind. Baths. Leeches. Trees. Flat land. Cats. Alone and safe and perfect.' _

The tiny warrior came upon a pillar of smoke late in the day. The sun was beginning to lower slightly in the sky. Sakura initially thought it was not worth it to follow this smoke. She'd seen no sign of life but wildcats in days. And those she had killed the moment they had pounced on her.

'_I hope I don't kill this person-with-a-smoke-pillar as soon as I see them.' _she quipped pathetically in her mind. True, she was not initially wanting to go towards the smoke pillar, but it came closer on its own, and before long Sakura saw a pair of log cabins on the horizon, not far from her path. It was hardly three hundred feet out of the way. For its practicality, Sakura chose the decision of going towards it.

For what purpose? A piece of her wondered. Talking with the owner of the home, perhaps. Helping them with their gardening. The cabins came closer into view. Sakura saw logs sticking out of place on both of them. Logs sticking too far _into _place, for something had smashed them in.

They were built right onto the grass. No patch of land was plowed or in season or filled or partially filled with crops. There were no scents of corpses. The place smelled fresh and fine as the wind and the grass.

"It cannot be so bad…" Sakura muttered to herself, scratching the side of her head and looking around with eyes that had become more perceptive than ever. "There's no blood…a house that is not broken or falling…no demons or cats or thieves…it looks very nice."

The first cabin was noticeably smaller, perhaps large enough to fit a few horses. From descriptions she'd heard by the guards that would sometimes stand by the huge cell she lived in, she figured it to be a smokehouse. There were racks to hold up pieces of meat, and there was a fire burning in the pit at the bottom, making a pillar of smoke, but no meat sat on the racks.

With a decisive sigh, Sakura walked over to the larger cabin. Surely there were people there, or signs of people that had used to be there. The door was slightly ajar. "Excuse me," she said, hoping she was loud enough for someone to hear. "Excuse me…I, er…just wanted to see if there were any people here…because it's a bit strange to see a house after days and days of nothing but grass."

While speaking she had pushed the door fully open. Upon finishing the word "grass," Sakura was glad she had finished speaking. Speaking was not meant for here, for this. Silence and awe and fear were for this.

Hanging from a cracked beam in the ceiling, from a rope looped around the beam, was a woman. The front of her dress was striped with one wide stream of blood oozing from a place around her neck Sakura couldn't see. Tiny droplets of it fell onto the dirt floor. To the feet of a tiny blonde girl sitting on the ground.

The girl did not look up. She stared at the blood droplets on the floor and Sakura stared at the woman who had hung herself. "Is this your mother?" she said softly. The girl said, "Yes." Sakura asked, "Why did she do that?"

"Everyone does that."

Sakura had never seen a human hang herself before. She could see the snapped neck, and easily guessed the physics of how the process worked, and wondered pointlessly why the woman had done such a thing. If death was so easily accomplished by the claws of a wildcat or through the delivery of demon offspring or starvation…why hanging?

"Why does everyone do that?" Sakura wondered aloud, still staring. "It looks like a rather stupid way to kill yourself, putting yourself up like an ornament when some other person will have to go through the trouble of taking you down and throwing you out." Immediately Sakura wished for a way to be slapped, to never have said such a horrible thing, to never have said that about this little girl's mother.

"It's very fast. You neck snaps in just a moment, and then you're dead. I can't hang myself. I don't weigh enough and my neck wouldn't snap. I would suffocate very slowly. So it would be stupid to hang myself."

"Who else did this? Did you have to take them down and give them to the cats?"

"Sister did it. And Cousin. And Uncle. They were all old. They weighed more than me. Their necks snapped quick."

"Why did Mother leave you alone if she knew you couldn't die too?"

"She didn't want me to die yet."

"What did she want?"

"She wanted to enjoy hell for a few days before I went down there, too."

Reality was a strange feeling. The little girl was so used to it she was numbed, and it washed over Sakura like a warm ocean wave, telling her things, showing her everything, giving her something she needed to fix. This was something that would not exist in her land, when she was a lady, a ruler of a land. No mother who hated her child would kill herself and leave the child to die by nature's ruthless claw.

It was not the apples she had eaten that made Sakura strong then. Strength pulsed in her arms, in the same manner it had when she had punched that strange man in the Undergrounds. "What is your name?" she asked.

"I saw a bird on the smokehouse once. I called it Petra."

'_She was given no name. She has nothing. Not even a name.' _Sakura clenched her fists, fists that had crushed the skulls of demons and bears and tigers. "You're Petra now. And you're not going to hell like your mother did, Petra."

Slowly, Sakura walked over to the young girl, bent down and grabbed her head, and snapped her neck.

666

Because if you're in this world, and you have nothing to give but various threats to your life, and this child has nothing and no reason to live and a guarantee of murder by animal claws before nightfall, what would you do if you could?

Besides the fact that I am pointing at the new chapter to my Pokemon-Naruto crossover fanfiction, Pathway, and also I know some of this seemed like filler...I don't have anything else to tell you now. Till next time.

Ta…Storm


	6. Pounding Of Horses Steel Hooves

Hot damn, novelist on a high here. A _writing _high, which translates to the fact that Storm is really going strong on the progress her second novel (srsly) and she's very proud of it. In other news, Storm is also constantly playing her Pokemon FireRed and LeafGreen games and found that somehow, beating the Elite Four on LeafGreen for the first time brought some good inspiration for Storm to write The Greatest Gladiator.

Allright, enough of that weird third-person shit. Makes me look three years old. Strangely I have nothing else to say so we'll get onto the reviews and then the actual story, yeah?

**Reviews: **

**Aznkitty180: **Cruelty is the middle name of all the lords, and sacrifice…wasn't a word I thought of before for the situation, but it fits, don't it?

**Jaerch: **I tried to make this world a great deal worse than our own and I was hoping I succeeded.

**Akatsuki-girl554: **It was the same thing I'd do in Sakura's position. I'd rather hang or shoot the little girl than leave her to starve or be eaten by animals in front of her dead mother, you know?

**Nikuyoku Taida: **As _always, _excellent? You sure?

**Yuki san1: **I believed Sakura's interaction with Petra was "the best she could do" and I'm glad you'll be added to the group who understands why she did it. I was sort of worried someone would up and say, "WTF she killed a little girl that cold BITCH!!1"

**Sakura-anbu-09: **Despite your comment being one-worded, I still get a truly touched feel from you. Am I wrong?

**Sailorcherryblossom: **Yes, cry, woman! Drawing emotional reactions is the point! Cry _ten _rivers!

**LarkasBlessing122291: **All your adjectives are words I had in mind when making up this world. Seriously, every one (and some others, sure, but you get it.) And the part of the world you live in is obviously a good part. There _are _some little pockets left of our world that are similar, somewhat, to this one. Most of these pockets are in either poor or warring countries.

**BloodxMoonxNightmare: **I'm thankful you're so moved by this tale, I really tried to make it so people would find their hearts going out to the poor dwellers of this place. And I didn't aim for "phenomenal," but I'll take it nonetheless!

**Sakeryu: **Depth, thank you! Character development I wasn't sure I was doing so well, so thank you for giving an opinion on that. I considered better development but wasn't sure where to put it in. And of course your comment of one person changing the world, of it being possible, made me smile, and probably Sakura too.

**Shannon: **Update commence!

**Amber A: **You don't need to log in, so long as some people give feedback they can give their name as SGJGU422RIE325 for all I care. I can't be mad at your or anything for saying "update soon," because my eyes were locked on Airborne most of the time anyway.

**Silverymoonfire: **Allright, point achieved! I didn't want this story to be like any other. And it's uniqueness…as the authoress, me bragging is frowned upon, but I am proud of it.

**Freakhorrorchick: **Good, good! I've converted another fan in my midst. Here's the next chapter for you…

**H3rshey675: **(Psst. I looked for your deviantART account. Couldn't find it.) I, too love the way Sakura kicks ass, and I make it a prominent point in all my stories, whether it fits in or not. Also I thank you for mentioning Airborne in your favorites as well as this. I consider these two to be my best stories.

**Jordancho, Deep-Dreaming, Clairesa-chan and Ogami ga-chan: **This is rude of me to shove you all into one review-reply but I MUST WRITE LIKE NOW so I must quickly thank you all for showing your liking for this story, however short your feedback is. Every review given is effort and gratitude for me and I appreciate every one.

666

At the Information Vault

666

What's that, children? You want a bedtime story to scare the dream-wolves away? Well, allright, but you must sleep right after. We have to plant the tomatoes very early tomorrow morning and you'll need as much rest as possible. It will be tiresome work and we may be trudging around the fields in the rain if this cloudy weather keeps up.

I know, I know the bed sheet is thin and small, you've told me this every night for months now. But would you rather I skin your favorite lambs to make a better one? No? That's too bad, my children. Cousin Merra is in the cellar weaving together that infant lamb's skin right now. Don't look so pale, children. That lamb was sickening and weak and your bed may be warmer tomorrow night with a new sheet. And tomorrow morning if Cousin Merra can peel away enough meat from the lamb we may have fresh meat for breakfast tomorrow. Oh, do stop acting dramatic, children! We have another lamb to spare, we are luckier than any family in this land!

Here is the story. It takes place many, many years ago, when the Great Continent was not yet made, and it was made up of a few smaller continents. Each continent had many, many people on it, and though many of them starved like the people of our time, there was also a number of them that had so much food they had gotten fat to the point of becoming ugly. The people of this time were very intelligent and they created many strange and useful devices to help them through life. It is a time that many folk are unsure about, because there is evidence that it did exist, that there were some fat, smart and happy people at one point, and there is also evidence that it did not exist and there was always one large continent and never four or five small ones.

One day, you see, children, one of these smart folk created a potion of sorts. No one knows what the potion was supposed to do, but when its container was spilled and the liquid touched an unfortunate woman's skin, her eyes turned red and she vomited blood all over the passersby. She attacked the folk near her in a furious rage and tore off hunks of their skin and flesh with her teeth. Each person bitten became a hungry lunatic themselves if they were not eaten down to piles of bones, and they and bit and fed on others, till an entire continent had this horrid disease. Survivors were few and dwindled every day.

The lords of the other continents sealed off the entrances and exits to this continent and left the survivors to die, and the infected folk to starve. It took several weeks, too, for the hungry, screaming people were strong and well-built in their sickness and could stand long periods of starvation. At last the entire continent was declared safe, and there was not a single person alive on it—the numerous bugs eating the corpses were hardly mentioned—and the rulers of other continents sent groups of their own dwellers to the dead continent to repopulate it and bring the world back to normalcy.

As you may be thinking those lords were utter fools to do so and they should have left the dead continent alone forever. The new people who took over homes on that dead continent set to work on taking down the boards on the windows and washing off the signs on the roof that, in a foreign language, begged for help. Some amount of weeks passed swimmingly and the houses were returned to a state of decency. The people began to work and farm and mingle and live pleasantly.

Ah, you're right, child, life cannot be pleasant, so declares the spirits above and below. Many weeks after the new people had settled into their lives, a man woke up to a furious and loud knocking on his door, and he and his wife went to answer it. They opened the door to see a strange man and were immediately struck by stinking blood that he spewed from his mouth. The man stuck his thumbs through the wife's eyes and at through the husband's spinal cord and ate away at them till they became enraged as well and attempted to eat their attacker, then each other.

No one knows how that one horrid man survived the time of starvation but the tale tells us that one would never guess he was starved. The man was not fat but most definitely not skinny like folk of our time are, and the legend tells that he was also finely tanned, probably by spending days in the sun looking for food.

This one screaming, sick man spread the disease once more throughout the unfortunate continent and a ship captain taking wood and metal off of the continent was attacked halfway through his voyage, and thus the disease was spread to a second continent, the largest of those existing at the time. By the time another year went by, the entire world was covered with crowds of blood-spewing, hungry savages. The number of survivors was thought to be under a hundred, which for an entire planet, my children, it an utterly pathetic number.

The survivors this time were wise and lived underground and the enraged hungry folk were too animalistic and stupid to search there. In another year, the cannibalistic rage faded once more, and left the planet decimated, grey, and smelling of literally all the rotting corpses in the world.

The survivors set to work burying and burning the bodies, leaving the skies stained with smoke for many years. The people multiplied over many, many centuries and millenia, and the continents moved closer together till they were but one enormous piece of land, and there were not seven seas but one that took up the greater part of the planet. Lords rose and fell and shinobi trained and fought and the common folk farmed and attempted to eat.

It is said, my mother and father told me, that all the world is brought together in this single continent and there is only one island in the entire world, and there the infected still breed and have learned to eat not just human flesh, but whatever they can find. You see, children, the enraged folk there have learned to engage in primitive, ugly mating with one another and breed tiny infected infants that eat fish and their own parents and rotted fruit and anything else they can find. And they say that when the continents became one and left that little island out there on its own, there were still a tiny number of enraged folk left, and they too began mating and breeding to make more cannibalistic beings, though their breeding made different sorts of offspring.

The island-enraged-folk look very much like people save for bloodied faces and nakedness, the legend says, and the continent-enraged-folk, children, are the demons that we so fear in our lands, the black creatures that come in all shapes and sizes for they impregnate any female creature they find if they do not eat her.

No one knows why there are less demons nowadays than there were enraged folk back then. But the relation remains. The demons are links to our past, links to poor folk who were assaulted and forced to become slathering, animalistic savages something like the demons of today. Remember that, daughters, if a demon captures you and impregnates you, and son, if a demon captures you and eats away at your limbs. It may end up being a fine distracting thought.

Pleasant dreams, children.

666

September 19th, 7:20 PM

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Months had gone by. Months! Sakura's mind reeled and she attempted to patiently sort out the reasons and factors. Surely sometime between April and August she would have moved about the entire land and found the lord's castle? Was the country so very large? Was that something she'd never been told about this land, that the Land of Rain was the largest land of them all? And if it was not, how would she find the castle of the lord who _did _have the largest land? Would it take her years?

Kurenai would be long dead by then. Kurenai was probably long dead right now.

Sakura felt a clenching in her heart, a feeling she found now all too familiar. Numerous families, villagers, lone folk attempting to live without help of another, and even long-dead bodies had all been touched by her, and more than once the one she attempted to help came up with the short end of the stick…the short end of the stick, you see, was more than often burnt or eaten by an angry little wood mite.

Easily, it came to memory: the twin sisters she had met not two days after snapping the neck of little Petra. "Don't hurt us, don't hurt us!" the one with long, silvery hair had said. "We're not virgins, we're…we're running from the men that took us, and our mother away. They…they took our…_scraps _of innocence!" Sakura remembered every word, hitch of breath and crack of her voice. And the one with shorter silvery hair had begged Sakura for food, for any crumb. She was looking at the two apples that Sakura held as she said this, and the pink-haired maiden handed an apple to each twin without hesitation. They were gobbled down, stem, core and all.

"You'd best head that way." Sakura said, pointing to the east. "If the men who assaulted your are to the north, you'd best not run in an obvious straight line to get away from them. To the south there is a cottage with a dead little girl inside and there will be hungry cats there." The longer-haired twin gathered up her sister and they limped away, bowing to Sakura dramatically before they left. They did not ask her name and Sakura thought they had better things to do than learn it.

And not a half hour later she came upon the gang of men who had raped the twin sisters. It was a trio, all on horseback, one of them naked save for his sandals. Sakura proceeded to ignore their unattractive requests for her to spend the night with them and leapt upon their horses one at a time and kicked them off. Each man was promptly beaten till his skull was flat and Sakura's knuckles were stained red. She tied the horses' reins together and rode upon the leader before reaching a river, watering the horses, and leaving them there. (She didn't wish to endanger any poor horses in her quest.)

Her next three social interactions were all with villages as opposed to single, or small groups of, people. The first village was filled with skinny, tired men whose wives and daughters and sisters had been hauled away by some Undergrounds manager to be his personal brothel. The village's crops had been burned in the kidnapping raid and most were too injured to continue farming and planting. Sakura approached them and asked the first man she met if she might help with the gardening, if she would be allowed to wash her bloody, dirty gown in the village's river. The reply was immediate and almost pathetically ecstatic. Nearly all the villagers, all men, watched the young maid work the plow mules about the fields and sweat in her newly-washed turquoise dress that did not cover her shoulders, arms and calves. She washed her dress a second time, mostly because the villagers insisted, and was on her way.

At her two-day stay in the first village, she had refused all foods offered to her, believing the villagers deserved it more. By some possibly-god-given luck, she came upon the fresh corpse of a giraffe, with only a moderate amount of flesh ripped out. Our patient and strong maid prayed that the animal's spirit was at peace and tried not to breathe deeply when extracting some meat for herself. She roasted this on a tiny flame she made herself—burning almost all her fingers—and found giraffe meat was quite scrumptious when roasted.

Two more villages she assisted after that, the first insisting she spend the night at the local brothel instead of killing the trio of rabid, demon-like horses being kept in someone's cellar. She killed the poor horses under cover of night when the men of the tiny village were crooning to her like an infant for her to come to the brothel and she left without any goodbyes. The third village wasn't a village as it was merely five log cabins sitting within sightline of each other, and a child in this village was sick. It was said that the cure to this disease was a paste mixture of wildcat blood, dew and a breed of mushroom called anglet. The mushroom sample and dew were easily collected. The wildcat blood was a trifle challenging.

One wildcat could not be found without its brethren or pack members nearby. One wildcat with four pack members did Sakura find that day, and one wildcat and four pack members did she kill, and four wildcats did she give to the villagers to sate their hunger. The fifth was drained of some of its blood and used to make the sickness cure. The village "leader", the parent of the sick child, was the only one to suggest that she take some of the fifth wildcat's meat as a gift. Sakura did so.

And so she went, assisting him or her or them wherever possible, for Sakura's goal was to make a difference however small, and she knew she had done more good deeds than most folk on god's green earth could boast. The summer was coming to a close and fall was soon to come with its biting winds and changing colors.

In a nondescript region of dry, dull hills and dead, cloudless skies did Sakura travel. In a nondescript region of dry, dull hills and dead cloudless skies did she see a group of people—people carrying weapons—being chased by a slightly larger group of people. The second group was on horseback and their taunting calls could be heard even at Sakura's distance. They were headed, somewhat, in her direction and would more than likely pass close enough to see her standing on that lone hill. The first group, on foot, was losing a battle. One man fell and was trampled under two different horses.

The maid's eyes of emerald flared, and she took off running towards them.

At first, only one of the thirty or so horsemen saw her and he spared her only a glance. He was the one who alerted him comrades to her presence. They looked over at their friend and saw a lean little maid with flaming green eyes was attempting to shove the man off his horse. She succeeded, and pulled the horses reins, steering it into another steed and making them both fall over themselves. Six more horses and six more men fell. At this point Sakura saw the first group of people had not been running from the horsemen but jabbing at them as they rode with their weapons, and the battle was not quite the massacre she'd first assumed it to be.

One of the ground-men saw her and tossed her a small dagger. She caught this and tossed it at the nearest horsemen. The man came over to her and stood at her back while a little group of armed horsemen surrounded them. She was handed a second dagger, a longer one, and with this Sakura helped the ground-men slaughter the horsemen. By the end of the battle her wrists and the hem of her dress were stained with human blood once more and the squadron of ground-men gathered in a ragged circle.

"Th-thank you, young maiden…" one of them panted, and Sakura immediately recognized this one as the man who had given her daggers. "Your strange combat skills have saved us many casualties this day. We are in your debt!"

Another man came up to her. This one was only a few years older than Sakura, but he had a patch over one eye and his remaining one looked clouded and half-blind. "You came to us at the best possible time. We—I—those horsemen have been plaguing us for weeks now. It…" He paused, uncertain. "What's your name, maiden?"

"I am Sakura," she said with a little smile, and the hearts of many of the soldiers fluttered. "For months now I have been going about the land, helping as many folk as I can. I think I've been very successful."

"I'll bet." Said a third man. "You fight like a creature from the Undergrounds, Sakura. And blood does not appear…to trouble you." He gazed up and down Sakura's lithe body, noting both blood stains, bruises and cuts and also as many fine and curves lines of her small body he could find. "Sakura…I don't suppose you would wish to…fight again…with another group of horsemen…"As she handed the dagger back the group leader she interrupted, "Yes, I would, if you'd let me." Immediately two dozen or more heads bobbed in answer.

The leader, whose nose was scarred, spoke again and on an unseen signal he began leading the group northward. "We meet a group of horsemen like those every other day. Sometimes every consecutive day for a very long time. We think they are men from Lord Pein's chosen villages, having their first shinobi training assignment. Their assignment is to decimate our home. It is only one long cabin, you see, one so long all of us and our wives and children can fit inside and live comfortably. They've tried to burn and destroy our cabin before. Since the beginning of June, they've tried." Sakura thought the man looked quite old. Older than he had the second he'd first spoken to her.

A structure came into view, one so long it seemed to stretch from one end of the horizon to the other, till it came close enough to be viewed clearly. It was still ridiculously large, and the men led Sakura into one end of it, her walking in front of the entire group of men. She was met by a sight of a dozen fires and dozens of emaciated women and little children. The youngest ones limped up to their fathers and begged to be held and coddled and the fathers were happy to do so. All but the leader of the group, who took Sakura by the hand and led her to the very back of the huge cabin. She was stared at admirably by all the dwellers of the cabin and she smiled back as amiably as she could, and genuinely, for she wished for some reason to smile at these people.

At last they came to the end of the structure and from her the leader raised his hands to his mouth and shouted, "My friends!" And immediately everyone looked back. Sakura hid her bloodstained hands behind her back but grinned at the folk staring at her. "This young maid came out of nowhere in the middle of our battle with the horsemen and helped us kill every last one. She is the closest thing to an angel I have ever seen." He looked at her with a different kind of smile than Sakura was used to, but she, with a suddenly gleeful mood, couldn't stop herself from also smiling at him.

The gasps and mutterings of the cabin folk only bolstered the young girl's mood. She could hear the awe and wonder in their voice, and in the quiet babble she caught the question, "Where are you from, girl?"

With nothing to suggest her home had been decrepit and inhumane, Sakura replied, "I came out of the Undergrounds." She was called to sit on a rounded stone that was meant to serve as a chair, offered a cup of foul-tasting liquid stuff, and a chance to tell all what she had experienced in her indeterminate number of years.

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September 20th, 9:00 AM

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"I've smelled their smoke and body odor since dawn. I know they're not far from here."

"You're sure, Iruka?"

"Completely. And there are more than thirty this time. Much more. I trust my sense of smell almost more than my sight."

"I'll help you sharpen your spears if you like."

"Sakura, I wonder how your soul came to be so kind. That would be grand if you helped. This one is particularly dull…"

And so the leader of the cabin folk, Iruka Umino, had employed young Sakura into his squadron of soldiers, in hopes of killing more horsemen and perhaps finally seeing the end of the ceaseless wave of malignant steeds and riders. Having understood that the poor girl was from the Undergrounds—and was perhaps the only person to live over a week down there—and that her aim was to, at worst, help a few folk ease their life troubles and at most, kill a ruling lord or two, Iruka realized he'd come upon the best source of good luck in the entire country. What he disliked about her, though, was the fact that she refused the blackberries he'd offered her, often the only food his "villagers" got to eat, and when she took it into her hand she fed it to the nearest starved-looking child and refused any more.

He could not get the girl to eat. At last he snuck up behind her when she was busy sharpening one of his friend's spears and reached around and shoved a handful of berries into her mouth. Sakura had more grace than to spit them out and chewed and swallowed the bundle before pointing the spear at Iruka and saying, with bluish juice trickling down her chin, "Iruka, it's very _rude _to stuff a poor girl's face with food when she'd not expecting it!" A good part of the cabin folk had found the strength to laugh.

"_En—r—let u—pro—surren—wha—"_

The newly-chosen shinobi were chanting random threats and curses down to the great cabin. Were less than a half mile away. "They've moved closer!" Iruka cried. "They could be attacking! Men, grab all your spears and swords!" And off went Iruka, Sakura, and all the men of the cabin. They got some ten steps out of the structure before realizing that, as Iruka had sensed, there were far more horsemen than thirty.

The entire hill was lined with them, horizon to horizon with no break till the line extended so far the men disappeared into fog. Each rode a black stallion and carried sharpened silver pikes and swords of the finest craft. They raised these weapons high and screamed to the high heavens. The cabin shook on its foundations and the eardrums of the cabin folk thrummed.

"A hundred and fifty? Three hundred? Four?" One of the men, Danzo, was muttering to himself. "We're going to die this time. We can't possibly—not even with the angel—"

Sakura did not comment on being called an angel. She turned and faced Iruka's men. "We will kill as many as possible before we're all taken down. That, or die begging cowards. And the horsemen can't have a greater pleasure than seeing that."

This was enough to partially rouse a quarter or so of the men. But when Sakura turned again the face the line of black horsemen they were charging. Sakura grasped a sword in one hand and clenched a powerful fist in the other. _'This may be the end. But I can't think of a better way to die. Perhaps that's why I'm hardly frightened. If only Iruka's men could feel the same!' _She took off running, and Iruka and then his men followed her, and when she leapt and beheaded the first of the horsemen she jumped on his horse and stood straight and tall—and at this point the battle raged around her as one she'd never seen.

It was all she could do to jump from horseback to horseback, kicking men off their steeds or cutting them down and letting their bodies fall off the steed. It was all she could do to weave around in the crowd, on the ground and not on horses, aiming punches at any dressed elegantly and regally, dislocating and cracking bones and ripping skin with her bare fingers. They were such effective methods! Yet Sakura felt herself weakening every minute and could not place why till she'd killed her thirty-third horsemen and her ninth horse.

There was a knife sticking out of her side, its handle bloodied, probably stuck there by a man mortally wounded and bleeding. How she hadn't noticed the pain of its presence or even its entry was a mystery. She pulled the weapon out immediately and cried out. The absence of the knife within her was much more agonizing than its presence.

It halted her. She fell to one knee and had a heart-pounding duel with a man who struck at her while standing up, mocking her lower position. At last she cut a slit in his stomach and pushed on his dead body to heave herself up to a standing position. Here, she felt two more knives enter her, and then a third. Twin pains blossomed like angry flames in both her legs, and a third erupted—_erupted_—in her shoulder, dangerously close to her neck.

Sakura screamed and felt something blunt strike her head. She staggered, turned, and aimed a roundhouse kick at a man wielding a club. There was a darkly satisfying crack of the infidel's ribs. Instead of letting him fall to the ground Sakura kicked him away, and ran in the other direction to help Danzo, who was surrounded.

All at once the clashing of swords and screaming of helpless women and cries of wounded men stopped. Cold steel chains clasped around her hands, pinning them behind her back and Sakura fell forward onto her face. The pain of the shoulder wound intensified and she knew closing her eyes against the pain was a foolish idea but this she did anyway, for the agony was far too great. She stood up and opened her eyes and was face to face with one of the tallest horsemen she'd seen yet. He was not on his steed, but stood with a sword in one hand and a whip in the other. A dozen or so of his comrades stood behind him—the dozens and dozens of others were behind her, murmuring, she could hear them—but before she could react to anything, the tall horsemen grasped one of her shoulders, squeezing to it to the very bone—

"On your knees, child." And she was slammed down to the ground, head bowed low and hands bound.

There was silence. Sakura panted both to give menial relief to the pain of her wounds and to fill the silence. There was surely a reason all had gone so quiet. Surely they meant to kill her in front of Iruka and all his people. Surely they meant to do it as they had started it in the battle: stabbing her in different places, till she died of blood loss or her heart or brain was cleaved through.

"I've heard of you, little girl. I met a pair of young girls on my way here, who said you'd given them food some months ago, and steered them away from trouble."

_The twins with silver hair. _

"And also there was a little village, a tiny one, where an an antidote was needed, an antidote made of wildcat blood. You killed five wildcats and retrieved the blood."

_The sick infant, and his father who gave me strips of meat to take with me. _

The horseman tapped his whip against his thigh and made a strange sound in the back of his throat. Sakura clenched her teeth at the ugly sound. "I've heard of at least thirty other little things you've done, little girl. Probably more than thirty, I'd bet. You're a true miracle worker, aren't you? I heard all five of the lords have been looking for you. Since April. How did you evade all those trained shinobi so long?"

Sakura felt like answering, either telling the man she was _that damned good _or perhaps, more kindly, _it was just luck _but found her three worst wounds, doubling up with all her others, prevented her from speaking properly. She felt something well up in her throat, and hoped it was merely saliva. She couldn't recall any wounds that were near enough to her throat to cause her to spit up her own blood. She had never felt such torture before. Could not speak without screaming aloud, decimate whatever dignity she had left and _scream _before her torturers—because of this, Sakura could hardly register the significance of being wanted by each and every lord.

She did notice, however, when the horseman spoke again, something like, "--but now I brought my best men just to find you, and I think I'll keep you for a bit before--'" and new voice came by her, one close enough that she probably should have seen the speaker.

"Disgusting _barbarian. _How _dare _you touch my beauty!"

The horseman standing before her dropped his whip. His sword was knocked out of his grasp as well, when a projectile came flying from somewhere outside Sakura's sightline and jammed into the horseman's face, cutting through one of his eyes and piercing the soft brain behind. The "thunk" sound this made forced Sakura to look up from the interesting piece of grass she'd been staring at to ease her anguish, and realize…someone had struck the horseman…and all the other horsemen were falling to their hands and knees. Sakura didn't dare turn to see for whom they bowed. She knew her shoulder muscles would flare in horrid displeasure. She stared ahead, at the ground, ahead, at the ground, eyes drooping weakly.

She heard footsteps, coming closer, wondered if tensing up in anxiety would pain her shoulder or any other wounds she may have had. A black figure appeared on the very edge of her vision, or rather, someone wearing black garments. They moved in front of her. She moved her eyes but not her head to look, and found her hair covering parts of her eyes, as it usually did in that scruffy way, prevented her from seeing this new person.

To his credit, the man got down on one knee, dirtying his trousers with blood and dirt, and moved her hair out of her eyes. Sakura stared into a face pocketed with pieces of metal, eyes of many shades of grey, hair orange as the pelt of any tiger.

Sakura noticed—it couldn't _not _be noticed—that this man of many piercings was extraordinarily handsome. And the smirk-like quality to his smile suggested that he knew it was well. "I've seen a painting of you, you know." he said offhandedly. "I shall burn it when I see it next. It does not justify such perfect beauty as I am touching here." And here he touched her cheek with a gentleness that was unnatural for both the Lord of Rain and for anyone.

"Have you come to kill me, sir?" Sakura asked. "It would be better if you killed me alone, and none of Iruka's people. They've done nothing but defend themselves."

"Kill you…" Pein ignored the piece of Iruka and his people. "I'd sooner rip my spine out than kill you, little goddess. I'd sooner rip my spine out than cause you pain." Again he touched her face with such extreme tenderness Sakura felt sure that he was lying. Her eyes narrowed, flared just a bit with cynicism as darkness began closing in at the corners of her eyes. "Then you'd better close my damned wounds."

Pein caught the unconscious girl in his arms and felt that nothing, nothing on this earth, could have brought him greater pleasure.

666

Yes. The piece at the top is _totally _28 Days/Weeks Later.

I wanted originally to do an entire chapter solely devoted to Sakura's kind deed to some village/person/family, but I ended up fast-forwarding to her meeting her first lord. I realize Pein is pathetically OOC, but you'd best gut used to that before the next chapter. I'd say more, but it's 2 AM right now and I value my damn sleep.

Ta…Storm


	7. The One Who Was Godsend

Do any of you have a super-old video game from your childhood? Maybe it's a game that seems boring and lame now that we've got shit like Dead Space and SMB: Brawl, maybe it's been remade and the main character you remember as a cool hero is now…different. I used to play Spyro. All three games. I thought they were all _the shit. _I got the newest one for the Wii recently and found I apparently missed two other games in between this and the old three and Spyro is now parading about with this new girl dragon. I don't hate the new changes so much, but it's still so weird seeing my old dragon on a completely new, more complicated format…at least six years since his Playstation days!

I'm spouting this shit 'cause I have nothing better to say in this above-chapter note. I never have anything of moral significance or mind-blowing amazingness to say, just amusing little notes. Get used to it.

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At the Information Vault

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They say that in ancient times, times so ancient that ancient was not a word yet, music was a globally popular concept.

They had all sorts of songs and instruments and things we do not have now to make it beautiful and mystical and grand, so much so that it brought tears to some folk's eyes. There was angry music for angry folk, flowing and soothing music for the calmer peoples, and happy, cheery music for children. The music flowed with the culture and with the times and with the current events of the world (for in those days, one place on the planet knew exactly what was happening on the opposite side).

It is said that when the greatest man on the planet died, all the songs made in that year were loud and screaming and boisterous, as the man enjoyed them, while still honoring him with the confident grace and humility that was generally required with honor.

More importantly than the greatest man on the planet, though, were the times. The times and current events of the world were actually one thing, and when legend says the potion, the very potion that created the raging disease, was unleashed from the one continent where it had been previously contained, new music was not created, for all musicians were running for their lives. Mostly, those who still had minds for music listened to music that already existed. Most often music that suited the mood of dread and anger that filled the world at the time.

Unfortunately, less than a hundred of all the old world's songs still exist today. Those lyrics that were written on paper were burned years ago and warmed the bones of helpless and homeless people who prayed not to wake up to a demon licking them between their legs. Most of them did wake up to such a thing, sadly, and then woke up a second time to their offspring eating them if they were female, or having no manhood if they were male, for those were favored treats among demons.

What is the point of this tale, you say? Why go from cheery music to horrid music to demons to castration and inhuman offspring? Why include demons and music in the same story? Those are all fine questions. Here's one for you.

Where's my son who went to retrieve firewood and never came back, hm? Tell me that.

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September 23rd, 6:49 PM

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The goddess was dying.

His goddess, the creature of inhuman perfection that was at last safe in his palace, in his sight, in his very bed, was dying.

She would not be for long.

Pein's shinobi were skilled in combat, as were all shinobi. Few had any intelligence in healing, for most shinobis' wounds would heal on their own with the power of chakra the gods had given them. On average, each lord had five or six shinobi who could group together and perform a surgery, should such a thing ever be needed. The last recorded surgery had been done by the shinobi of some lord of Sound long ago, three or four decades if not more. Techniques and equipment had improved little since then, but with a single glare at the group of shinobi corps who had come with him, nine of them stepped up and offered their services to help save the young girl.

With the help of some winged demons the Lord of the Leaf had given him, he and the twenty-eight shinobi made their flight back to the Rain Palace from the area they'd been searching for the girl. Without speaking Pein had climbed three sets of stairs and set the beauty on his bed, allowed in the nine shinobi who otherwise would never have seen his personal chamber, and stood by while they prepared their tools and inspected wounds.

Exhaustion was a cause easy enough to guess. She had been wandering the land, his and perhaps his neighbor's, for months and the gods only knew how much she had eaten and slept in that time, in such unforgiving wilderness. Exhaustion, however, was only one of a thus far unknown number of causes. So far Pein's shinobi had also found traces of black fever in her blood, old scars of animal claws that were pale and fading on her skin, almost unnoticeable bumps on her body that showed dislocation or fracture of bones, not to mention the fact that there was blood dried in layers on her, suggesting she'd shed some, hers and not hers, almost every day. Pein was glad he had spotted her when he did. These things would have caught up to the beauty someday and killed her, and then she would have been at the mercy of the first lusty demon or bandit group to find her, or worse, the mercy of blank nature, the silent mercy of nothing at all.

The lord stayed at her bedside every moment possible and watched each procedure with nearly worshipful eyes. He had been incredibly lucky to see her in that group of battling villagers and bandits, lucky he'd been riding his winged demon that very moment. Luck, and his will, would save her now.

"Bandages, immediately, thin gauze—"

"Crushed marigold flower. Pound it into a paste. See the scar on the knee? Spread it there."

"New bedsheets! These are soaked through with red!"

Twice she opened her eyes and stared about her. On the first occasion one of his shinobi, Kakuzu, a fine and strangely loyal veteran if a demonic-looking one, pulled down his mask and looked at her instead of her wounds. He gasped, seeing with full clarity and no interruptions exactly why his lord had spent the entire summer seeking her out. One could say the gods had never birthed a creature so stunning, and would not be afraid of it being a lie.

At last he gathered his voice and said to her, "Tell me if you can hear me." The girl done nothing but blink at first. "Yes," she then whimpered so quietly he only just heard it. The red-soaked bedsheets beneath her were evidence enough that blood loss was forcing her unconscious again. The wounds those enemies of Iruka's had given her, those several stab wounds by daggers and swords, would not stop bleeding. Three of them had struck through veins and had to be closed, and it took three attempts before the blood flow even began leveling out.

Around the second occasion, only two shinobi were present in the room, one of them smoothing the pillow behind her (at the time her treatment was over and rest was all she needed now) and the second was slowly rubbing a healing ointment over an old scar that had opened up on her wrist. Pein ordered his subjects out the moment her lovely little eyes wrinkled in sleep and her breathing hitched. She turned her head and shifted a leg slightly. Pein watched her, wondering at her innocent dreams, and sat on the edge of the bed near her.

Her head was turned towards him, and this made it easier to hear the words she uttered in her sleep. Names and places and problems and meaningless phrases. He took in each one of them and formed a picture of her travels in his head, the best these meager words could give him. The lord of the Land of Rain was able to piece together some two or three of the girl's experiences and understand their most ground basics.

Silently she opened her eyes of striking emerald and stared up at him. She counted each piece of black steel stuck through his face and ears to try to keep herself awake and aware, but it had a nearly opposite effect. Pein brushed a hand over her sweet face and fought to urge to pull her possessively to him, for fear of reopening her wounds.

His next words were spoken softly, but they struck Sakura with all the force of a thrown hammer. "Little goddess," he could not resist calling her. "Little goddess, who is Petra?"

Sakura stared at him with wide eyes and did not breathe. She turned away from him and thankfully returned to sleep again.

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November 1st, 8:20 AM

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How horrible, if _this _was what death really was! Dark consciousness, lack of smell, sight, feel, nothing but simple darkness and thoughts forever after? If the gods were feeling fanciful today, she was merely dreaming this black loudspeaker of her own thoughts, or was in a coma or trance of some sort. If this was what death really was, if she had died in the middle of battle defending Iruka's people…then Sakura could understand why some spent their lives searching for immortality.

"Any signs today, Lord?"

A voice that wasn't her own? Talking about, no…talking _to _a lord?! In her own commoner presence?!

"She's spoken more than any of the previous days. Just an hour ago, she asked a woman in her sleep named Kornai to "listen to her", thrice in a row. I am wondering if Kornai was her guardian before she was taken to the Undergrounds. The child-hating sort."

'_Kornai?' _Sakura thought and immediately recalled the name the man had said incorrectly: _'Kurenai!' _

"And still she's taken in no food? Lian brought you those little spiced bits of lamb, didn't she?"

"I was able to make her swallow one. But no water at all."

"No water in six days? Can she live?"

'_Yes, can I live? Can I live to see the lord who is so near I can hear his voice? Can I live to kill him?'_

"You're the medic, Kakuzu. You should be the one to know."

'_Damn.' _

"…Lord, I can't know about someone who has lived a decade in the Undergrounds. I can say only that the strength she gained there has undoubtedly saved her. The specifics can hardly be studied unless she is conscious."

_Squeak-Squeak…squeak-squeak…_

"Irrelevant now." Sakura felt some warm object pressing lightly on her back. Pushing her down slightly. "Konan is coming."

Now as aware as she could be when she was apparently trapped in a plane of darkness, Sakura lie in wait for one called Konan and what Konan would do when near herself, the lord and Kakuzu. Only her own thoughts and vague noises could be heard presently, and she tuned her ears as best she could. The squeaking noise may have been someone's boots dragging or a little wagon moving across a surface. It was difficult to tell, and she pointlessly gambled a silver coin she didn't have that it was actually a wagon. She listened to the new silence around her.

The voice she recognized as the lord's sounded first. "This is not as I remember it, Konan." He did not sound angered, but curious, amused, mayhap.

"This stone trapped you in youth many years ago, Lord. I would not find it surprising if the gods had changed it in that long time when we were not looking. There is also the small chance that your polished memory fails you slightly, Lord." The awkwardness and fear in her voice was clear by the end of her talk. But when the lord assured her, "It is indeed possible. Either way, this stone cannot be mistaken for what it is," Konan's steps drifted around the room with ease and content.

There was a soft tapping, rubbing sound that Sakura found quite soothing to the ears. She found she could have fallen asleep listening to the scraping of that rock as aristocrats once may have drifted to dreams listening to sophisticated, fine music. It was ended all too soon by two separate items: firstly, young Sakura felt again the object on her back pressing comfortably down in a way that almost resembled massage. With the thought of massage, she realized that this object touching her was a human hand. It could only be Kakuzu's or the lord's. Without meaning to, Sakura shivered, and the hand moved over her. It scratched her neck lightly.

"She's cold." the lord murmured.

'…_Me? Does he really mean me? He can't! Why would he?' _

"The process will warm her significantly," Konan assured. The pinkette felt a second hand, this time on her half-extended arm. It was smaller than the first, undeniably feminine and very cool. It drifted up her arm, over her shoulder and settled just next to her left breast. Konan grunted and retreated to another end of the room, leaving Sakura to wonder if this woman's touch had been inappropriate or not. The air heated suddenly, radiated with a force so great Sakura's breath stopped literally in her throat—stopped there as though a tunnel had caved in on that spot.

She could not breathe through that force.

It grew only warmer, turning uncomfortably hot, as it came closer. The unknown object of heat trailed the same path as Konan's hand—touching her skin, almost burning it with its warmth—and ended its journey just before Sakura's left breast. It touched the unknown garment she was wearing at that moment and just under it on her skin as well, so that it could be told for what it truly was: a mere rock.

"Heart," Konan murmured. "It stops at her heart. How…how…"

"Perfect." the lord finished, and Sakura felt the first hand again, the lord's hand. This time it reached for her own hand and twined their fingers together like lovers. The moment Sakura's lack of air turned dangerously uncomfortable, those fingers tightened on hers. "She isn't breathing. Begin now_._"

Obediently, Konan began. Simultaneously, the pure darkness in Sakura's mind opened briefly and permitted the glowing figure of a glowing turquoise serpent.

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November 1st, 7:58 AM

666

Memories. Alertness. These two things alone kept in Sakura's mind the picture of that serpent gliding through the blackness of her brain. She could not recall what it had done once within her sight, however, nor when it had left or where exactly she was. Just before the serpent and Konan and Kakuzu and the stone they had prodded her with, she recalled at least a half dozen people moving around her, snapping briskly at each other and poking sharp things and soft things all over her body. Sakura hoped they had been so decent as to do their poking and prodding while she still had her dress on, that they hadn't given her a new garment or just done what they wished while she was naked and weak. Sakura realized what a silly wish that was and nearly laughed at herself. While she didn't have the strength to laugh, she did have the strength to smile, and did so.

"Milady? Can you hear me?" the girl's eyes lifted open slowly but steadily. Taking up all of Sakura's vision was a young woman wearing a white gown. Behind her she could only just make out wallpaper of rich patterns.

"…I can…" she murmured. The woman touched a wet cloth rag to her patient's forehead.

"Excellent. Your fever is gone and your breathing is normal. Are you hungry or thirsty?"

With just those two words the girl realized she was _very _hungry and _painfully _thirsty, and her bladder was full and her arm was itching. She soothed the only ache she could, the itch, and sat up. The woman's eyes went wide and she pressed Sakura down again with a cry.

"Please! Don't move. You mustn't strain yourself. You were terribly injured before."

For a moment the hunger, thirst and all her other needs waned to nothing. For a moment Sakura remembered humble and pleasant Iruka, his tribe of friends and family, her part in their battle against their attackers. The man of many piercings who had saved her from the lead bandit. She sat up again, faster than she had before and looked all about her.

"Iruka? Where is Iruka?" The room was about half as large as her old cell in the Undergrounds, the room that could hold dozens of girls. "Is he allright?" She was laying on a bed far too large for her petite self, on pillows so soft they must have been stuffed with dove feathers. "Are his people safe? Have the attackers been killed?" A fire blazed serenely in a corner next to a bookshelf that stretched almost up to the ceiling; swords and artifacts lay organized in racks on a wall. "How many of them died?" There were two windows in the room, one to the left of the bed and one to the right, stretching from floor to ceiling, looking down on a village in a green plain. "Do you know?!"

At all these sudden, almost violent questions the nursemaid quivered and held the rag protectively over her face. "I-I don't know! I was only told to care for you when His Majesty left to visit the Lord of Sand's palace…I am to feed and clothe you and give you whatever you ask for…"

Fear was written all over the girl's face, and all over the rest of her body, in fact. In response to this writing Sakura raised her soothing natural eraser and patted the woman's shoulder. "I'm sorry. I'm merely confused, is all. Can't quite expect me to act perfectly calm when I wake up to…" she gazed around at the outrageous and elaborate room, the weapons on the wall, the mahogany nightstand on which stood a little black bottle of…nail polish? "_this, _can you?"

The fear was erased to an extent. The nursemaid removed the rag and showed her face, her quivering little smile. "I suppose that's true. I don't know much, milady, but I'm sure the lord has chosen you as his new mistress…does this help at all?"

Sadly for both the nursemaid woman and Sakura, it did not help. To Sakura, mistress and courtesan meant the same thing, as did courtesan and whore.

Her voice carried all the quietly rising indignation and fury she felt: "It does not..." But, seeing and recognizing the nursemaid's expression of one realizing one's own uselessness, Sakura added on the personal implied question, "Miss…"

A blush rising to her blemished cheeks, the young woman raised her hands and waved them in front of her face. "Oh, no, no, no, milady! You have no need to call me 'miss,' I'm just a maid! I'm just a villager from Flexian!" She pointed over to one of the huge windows. "That's not it down there, we're at least seventy-five miles from here. But there's Xian just down there, and both look about the same, I think." Sakura jumped off the bed and dashed to the window and stared down.

The village of Xian was a collection of perhaps forty or fifty little square, cottage-shaped buildings—a number of epic proportions in comparison to most of the world's villages—and people tiny as ants could be seen moving between them. Those people and their homes were surrounded by a stone wall, spiked with steel at the top, at least two stories high. A pair of shinobi walked on the wall's top, expertly avoiding stepping on the steel spikes.

"Your village is a chosen village," Sakura whispered. "You have…safety. A wall and shinobi that guard you from demons all the time. What do you make for this place? Chosen villages spend all their time making things for the lord that protects them, don't they? What is it you make?"

"Swords, daggers, kunai…" the girl listed these things slowly on three of her fingers. "Xian there is more important. They farm cattle and chicken and lambs for meat for the shinobi's meals. When they go out to let them all graze, I hear the shinobi follow them and keep demons from eating the livestock. I, uhm…" she looked away, cheeks flushing again. "I think it's…a bit interesting. That shinobi would do that, watch after a herd of animals when there are…bandits to kill and such."

Through the woman's talking and Sakura's own gazing upon the village just below her, she had been repressing rather violent wishes to strangle the nearest shinobi to her. But she had come upon incredible luck, having a lord take her right to his palace, having him think her so beautiful he wanted her as a personal courtesan. He would suspect nothing when he found his new courtesan shattering his bones and taking command of all his shinobi. This was a stroke of _inconceivable _luck. Her life dream had been made that much easier.

If she made the right moves, she could spend a few days gaining the lord's trust before he decided she be taken to his bed. She could play the part of an awkward yet strong-willed young courtesan new to the world of seduction—that part would not be hard—and, gods willing, get him to sympathize. And even if he did not, even if he tackled her onto the bed before even asking her name, he would be leaving himself wide open to her. While he would be biting sensual marks into her skin and sliding her dress off her skin, she would be preparing to bite his tongue out and kick his shirtless ribcage in. And, should things not go well at all, should he see that she meant to kill him, should he try to dissuade her from that by means of his own seduction, that would not stop her. Nothing so trivial as sexual pleasure would keep Sakura from what her mind was locked on.

But that was all in the future. For now, this young woman needed to be talked to. "They go and guard the herds because their lord commands them to help the villagers. A lord's shinobi must do exactly as the lord commands." She couldn't resist a quick chuckle. "And if they don't like it, they can attempt to go assassinate some other lord and become one themselves. That's the way it is, isn't it? Things haven't changed while I've been traveling around?"

Her reply was a plain nod. "I always wondered if people who were not from chosen villages even knew of it. How did they find out, I wonder?"

The petite girl did not particularly care, nor had she ever wondered it. "I'm not sure. It's simply been a known fact, even where I was from."

At the last phrase the nursemaid's eyes went wide and her hands rose to her mouth. "That's right! That's right! You're the girl who lived in the Undergrounds for an entire decade! You were—" her shoulder drooped and her eyes went dark. "I heard about you. Even before you came aboveground. "Your section of the Undergrounds was…was not ten miles from my home. My father went there to watch the demon battles. He…" Without warning the nursemaid burst into tears. Sakura's eyes went wide and she tensed, suddenly caught off-guard. "I'm sorry! I'm so sorry! Living there, my own father watching you—"

Memories of her old days, of comforting the crying girls in her cell, bubbled up within Sakura's mind. She did not think of walking over to the maid and rubbing circles of no pattern on her back. She did so without the meaninglessness of thought. "That was not your fault and there was nothing you could have done," she said in a practiced voice. "It doesn't matter anyhow. I'm out and I'm…" she chose her next words with as much truthfulness as she could, "…in a better situation now than I was then."

"I should get back to my work now." the nursemaid said. "So much chatting. I was supposed to be bathing and feeding you! Do you need to relieve yourself? Do you still feel sick at all, milady?"

"I will tell you if you stop calling me 'milady,'" Sakura laughed. "I'm Sakura. It's my name so you should call me that, shouldn't you? What's your name?"

"I'm Ayame, milady, but you mustn't call me that! I'm merely a servant!" She bowed thrice. "I'll never understand how lucky I am to care for the Lord of Rain's most precious goddess!"

"Goddess…?" Sakura repeated with both confusion and mocking. "What…" And the battle for Iruka's people came about in her mind again. The man with steel in his face. He had called her a goddess. Claimed he would tear out his spine before causing her pain. Did he truly think she'd believed him? It was hardly worth wasting thought!

"Yes. My duty above all is to cleanse and feed you when you awoke. I must get, ah, to work." She held out a hand to Sakura and, understanding, she allowed her hand to be taken in Ayame's. She saw the long, tight sleeve of a navy-blue dress that was far too clean and smooth to be hers. Someone had undressed her and taken away her familiar, comfortable turquoise garment and redressed her in this one.

'_It BETTER have been Ayame.' _

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November 1st, 5:59 PM

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For the first time in her young life, Sakura was clean.

The Palace of Rain, she learned, had been built over an underground spring. The lowest floor of the castle was warm year-round and had a circular bed of rocks in the lowest and easternmost room. Within this circle was a naturally heated spring in which the lord and his courtesans would bathe. Ayame sat near the edge of the spring and handed Sakura appropriate brushes and lotions to clean herself. Sakura had asked why they hadn't gone to the place where servants bathed, so that Ayame could cleanse as well, but Ayame had flatly refused and called such a thing inappropriate.

Next her navy-blue gown had been replaced with a much more exposing one. It was the exact same color, but it had no sleeves, only two thin straps moving over to shoulders to keep said shoulders warm. It was meant for summer, but her bath had been warm and today was unnaturally hot so it was still a fine choice. Next, Ayame had brushed Sakura's hair, insisting on putting it up into a more womanly and seductive ponytail of bun upon her head. Sakura had politely refused, preferring instead to keep her plain and childish style of "nothing", or rather, her hair hanging down to her shoulders as it did naturally. Now, though, it hung down much more smoothly, and smelled of wildflowers and berries Sakura had never smelled, tasted or even heard of before. (Ayame promised her she would taste all she wanted later on. She did not specify, however, that berries and fruit would be the items tasted.)

Since she had never spent an entire morning cleaning, as courtesans often did, the normally relaxing experience had tired her out as much as a fight against three demons. She told Ayame she felt like falling asleep on her feet and with a giggle Ayame had said that it would be her pleasure to put her lord's goddess to sleep once more. And Sakura was returned to the chamber she'd woken in—the lord's own—Ayame had pulled the covers of the bed—the lord's own—up to the girl's chin and sat down on a wooden stool in the corner. Sakura had wanted to ask her older maid why she sat there, but fell asleep before she could get the words out.

Presently, voices within the room were fiddling with Sakura's oddly peaceful dreams.

"Certainly not, lord! I kept her own garment in the cloth-cleaning rooms as you said to. She's wearing her more suitable garb now. I've put more logs on the fire, just in case she was cold."

It was Ayame's voice, high-pitched and worried and flustered. The one that answered her was instantly recognizable: "She was given all she asked for?"

"I-I-I asked her many times if she would like anything. Almost each time I offered water, she drank, but all she has eaten today is…" Her voice hitched and stuttered fearfully. Sakura swore she could hear Ayame's heartbeat picking up. "…is the, the bowl of sunflower seeds on the windowsill of the kitchens."

Silent rage laced the reply. "The sunflower seeds in the kitchens."

Flightiness and horror were strung on the next words. "Yes, lord."

"Those are put out for _birds, _slave girl."

Ayame's body thumped on the ground. "I'm sorry, lord, I'm sorry! She would take nothing else! I swear on my mother's grave!"

Silence. Silence. Silence. Silence.

"Your work is done. Go to Konan's chamber and do what she wishes of you."

"I shall, lord, I shall!" Her feet made uneven, pattering, scuttling sounds as she rushed down the hall. Sakura listened sadly to Ayame's dreadful leave but then turned her mind towards the listening for the lord just outside the door. She would, after all, be his murderer. Perhaps it'd be best to look him in the eyes the moment he opened the door. And the moment the door made its distinguishing squeaking sound of opening, she sat up in bed and looked towards the door—and realized there was no one there because he had used his chakra to speed him to the bedside in half a second, so before she even sat up fully she turned her head to the left and saw him there.

There, standing above her, close enough to touch, radiating chakra so great that at this close distance there was no way _not _to touch it, was the killer of thousands, the demon who cut holes in his own face and whose eyes were like demons', who ruled over a country wherein it rained so much that there were years more people died by drowning than starvation, a man who sometimes wore the blue cloth-and-metal headband of the first man he'd ever killed, a _demon _in _human _shape, wearing a cloak of bloodstained clouds in a sky of ink—

It was too much. She had to either turn away and crush her own pride, or voice her outright awe.

"…Who are you?"

The reciprocating smile was so minute it may not have been there at all.

"I am god."

666

I've dreamed of making Pein say that last line since…since…since before I even had the idea for Greatest Gladiator. That's one personality trait of his you can't ignore. Since he rules a portion of the world and he can do whatever he damn well wants, it's certainly going to be exploited.

I feel this chapter is sort of rushed despite the fact that I took my time on it. Dunno. I kept looking back at a picture of five shirtless evil Naruto men on deviantART and I kept thinking "Number 2 is TEH SMEX I wanna write awesome shit bout him!" except with more civilized words because I'm not nearly that fangirlishly loud for my anime men. I quietly stalk them online.

Also one of the first sections in the chapter, in which Sakura is poked and prodded with a heated stone, is probably a confusing part of the story. It will be fully explained next chapter, but all you need to know is that stone is what is used to communicate with the gods and receive chakra from them, as well as receive life-lasting youth. Which process did Sakura undergo? Both, perhaps? Or some third process we haven't heard of yet? And what was the serpent she saw in her mind? I ain't telling.

Ta…Storm


	8. Eyes Of Colorless God

So, it's been said that in the manga, Pein's six forms have been named, all cleverly given names relating to Buddhism. The first Pein we ever saw is now called "Deva Pein," and should we get to know any of the other five more, let it be known that the Pein seen in The Greatest Gladiator is the "Deva Pein" that we all first laid eyes on, same time as we did Konan, back in chapter… three hundred somethin'.

And Happy Very Belated New Year to you guys. Since Christmastime of 2008, I have doubled the chapters to Airborne, and by next Christmas I may just be finished with that story, but I'm less sure of this one. I've thought of both happy and sad endings for this story (the area between now and the end is still grey) and I'm thinking maybe I'll do two endings, the last chapter and then an "Alternate Ending" chapter. The more I lengthen this paragraph and think about an alternate ending makes me more excited about it. We'll see where Gladiator is next year, yeah?

(FYI, Sakura, who likes making people happy, wishes you a Happy Late New Year, but our lovely lord Pein is far above such things, so frowns at you and wishes no such year. He orders his courtesans and shinobi to frown, also.)

**Reviews:**

**Clairesa-chan: **you think it's a masterpiece thus far? Gets better later, I'm guessing.

**Aznkitty180: **YEEES Pein must state his godly place in the world, he can't be himself if he doesn't do it at least once. I, too am divided between giving Pein screen-time and letting Sakura get a step closer to world peace and kill him. I personally don't want him to go either.

**Silver-heart377:** I wish I had updated sooner, too. I'm not usually that lazy and I could have typed this up faster, I know. Sakura faking or not faking a personality in front of Pein…is elaborated in the chapter below!

**Silverymoonfire: **Sakura? Polite, skull-crushing little Sakura? Become a mistress? God forbid.

**Sakeryu: **Who can't be enchanted by Pein's "becoming character?" His character alone makes me want to let him live a little longer.

**N a g a s h i . no . k u r o: **Pein is indeed a cocky bastard. But he's no Deidara.

**-carsly-: **This chapter came a bit faster than the last one, thank goodness.

**Freakhorrorchick: **Is it weird that Pein's line made me melt a bit too, even though I wrote it? I really did spend ten or so seconds staring at what I'd just typed after I did it.

**Lolitapop: **You luuurrve the story, and I luuurrve Pein (secretly!).

**Miss Chocolat: **I can give you directions to the picture of the shirtless men, if you like. They are _quite _shirtless and _quite _sexy. And thank you so much for noticing the "sophisticated whores"! I've been waiting for someone to notice they're treated well, beyond well, so that being a whore is actually a sought-after job among women in that world.

**i-am-cool2121: **Thanks for the mention of the "heated rock," I didn't want people to just ogle Pein and Sakura and ignore what is an important plot point. I did like your "slithering through her thoughts" pun, though. It's not as bad as my uncle's "Don't walk by a corn field, they'll stalk you!" thing.

**Shreaded wings: **"I'm-the-shit." Wow. That IS Pein's motto, isn't it? It should be. I thank you for your love of this story and also of Kakashi, 'cause I'm debating to put in him or Itachi as the next lord we see.

**Akatsuki-Girl554: **Wow. Someone actually took notice of that. Nice of you to call me talkative (sort of) I actually can't remember the last time someone told me that. I have been told, however, that I write super-long messages online when I could make them a lot shorter. But besides that, you're king for liking my stories!

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In The Memories of Folk Long Gone

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Once upon a time, in this dream of mine,

I saw a wild realm of silver-blue fairies

Drinking fine wine, on a king's supper did they dine,

Laughing and singing with voices of silver bells

Surrounded by rum-red sugar apples and glittering dragons,

Liberated from cells swinging in the flaming depths of all seven hells

Mushrooms flavored of mint and grass smelling of love,

Molested their senses and hearts and reminded them of safety

And they laughed in the presence of the godly dove.

Then did they so merrily dance, then did they so boisterously cheer,

For in the world of dragons and fairies and red-rum sugar apples

There is no such word as the human word _fear_

And even there, were there children, you see

Like ferrets, like mice, bouncing and romping up trees and down holes

Giggling and flustering in their bountiful glee!

Among all this, stood I, just I,

Dark and unseen amongst the green trees and glowing life

And I know that when my eyes burst with blackness and cold, no, I did not die.

In my dear father's bed my sagging old body again lay.

And then I, I, the seer of fairies and dragons and laughing children and rum-red sugar apples, then did _I, _

Cry.

666

November 1st, 6:00 PM

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'_What an arrogant son of a WHORE.' _Sakura thought.

She stared up at him, looking so much taller than he was because she was so fortunately laying in bed. If he wished to rip her virginity from between her legs this very moment, she—while not being powerless—would be at a great disadvantage to stop him. Sakura's doe-like eyes stared up at the lord with confused awe, and her mind whirled with hate.

'_No lord is god.' _she seethed within her mind._ 'There are many gods. If he had any speck of intelligence in him, he would tell me that he is a god, one of several gods, but to say that he is the only god in existence is beyond anything I've ever seen! I've seen humbler rapists than you, Lord of Rain! I'll be laughing when I cut your throat! I'll kick your severed head around like a child's ball! Ayame and I will kick it all around the village of Xian, Lord of Rain!' _

Something had to be said. What would she do, Sakura wondered now, should she pretend to be a woman skilled in sensuality, or a polite and fierce young girl, as she truly was? Did it matter? Would he see through her if she chose to fake a personality? She would have to take a chance. If he slapped her across the face for her insolence, it would neither be a new feeling nor unexpected to Sakura.

"What makes you think that?"

Like some think a god would do, the Lord of Rain laughed with his eyes and not his mouth.

"Look at me and see."

"I am looking at you," Sakura replied with just a touch of wryness.

"My eyes, child. Look at my eyes." Both politely and obediently, Sakura looked.

At first she saw silver circles within silver circles, a design that would have been eye-catching and confusing when used in art. But with human eyes they were undoubtedly demonic, more so than the metal he stuck through his face. Each one seemed to be a portal into another dimension, a portal within a portal, a dimension within a dimension, an eye inside an eye inside an eye. They stared down into her own innocent eyes like they were indeed made of silver metal: unmoving and definite and perhaps harder than the emerald her eyes and her will were made of. Perhaps the silver was stronger than the emerald in more ways than those. Perhaps the silver eyes—eyes that were the color of dais and thrones and crowns of rulers and of gods—were—were—

It didn't occur to Sakura that her pulse had begun picking up and the air was finding difficulty in moving to her throat. The Lord of Rain blinked, and with as much dignity as she could muster the girl took in a slow and sure breath that didn't at all suggest she'd just been overwhelmed by a pair of eyes.

She had to say something, do something, to distract him. If she had to look a fool, she would look a fool in front of people like Iruka. Not a lord. So she genuinely asked, concerning the state of his strange eyes, "Were your parents…cursed?" In response, the lord sat down on the edge of the bed, letting one long leg hand off. Sakura made room for him, as the bed was ridiculously large and she had been laying nearly on the edge. When he grasped her leg to keep her from moving, she stared him almost accusingly in the eye, and though she did so successfully, her stomach turned as she did it.

"They may have been. I have only one memory of them: I recall loving my mother more than my father…particularly when she was breading a fish for supper…and took the knife and ran outside. I loved her very much then."

Pein's hands held Sakura's head between them and Sakura immediately stiffened, recognizing her own position as one of a captured creature about to be devoured. She instinctively put one of her hands on his wrist to pull it away, to pull away the memories of demons in the Undergrounds rings doing the exact same thing to her. She stopped, realizing two things: firstly, her hand was so much smaller than his that it was worth stopping to look at, and secondly and more importantly: she had touched the lord. And she was still alive.

"Enough of them," the Lord of Rain said, as though trying to distract her from her own awed thoughts. But he must _not _have been trying to distract her, because he pulled her head a few inches—and a few inches only—closer to his. "I want to know of you."

"You already know everything of me, from what Ayame told me."

His hands tightened on her head and Sakura fought the need to shiver. "Ayame?" he said with the calm growl of hidden anger. "Who is Ayame?"

Naturally, Sakura was rather surprised. "A-Ayame—the servant girl who was with me today."

"Mm." And the hands were loose again, but undeniably…not moving. "Did she tell you of what was done to you not long ago?" Sakura's brows furrowed, not understanding. "Not so, it seems. You were unconscious when Konan preserved you." Pein would never know this was untrue; Sakura had indeed been awake when Konan had poked and prodded her with a warm stone.

"Your age was sealed, goddess." One hand roved slowly through her cherry hair. "You will be of eighteen years forever, and have this same beauty the day you die." For now, this had little to no effect on Sakura, for while her life-lasting youth was being proclaimed and while her previously always-guessed-upon age was declared for certain by science, Pein was gazing straight into her eyes.

The dimensional, silver eyes were boring into her as a drill bored into a mountain. Once she was able to avert her eyes, but saw the stupidity and rudeness of the gesture, so brought them back to look at him, and afterward could not look away, no matter how desperately she tried. She saw the metal piercings, the hair the color of amber stone in the sun, entire body carved of masculinity and perfection that shouldn't have been allowed on the earth…eyes of a demon.

The girl spoke with anger and confusion lacing her tone, and let such emotions into her words without a thought. "What do you want from me? I know you know everything I've done. I'm no good at any activities a courtesan would do with you."

This time, Pein smiled with both mouth and eyes. "We shall see."

Sakura gleefully allowed the scorn to seep into her tone now. She narrowed her eyes and tightened her grip on his wrist. "And will that be all, Your Majesty?"

He chuckled. "You wish, don't you?" Sakura hoped this was a joke. "No. I want you to stay in this palace as long as possible before I must share you. I want to see what tactics you used in your years in the Undergrounds. And presently—" This time several inches were covered as Pein pulled Sakura's pink head closer. "—I want to kiss you until you forget how to breathe."

Sakura covered her mouth with the back of her hand.

Pein chuckled again. "As I thought." He released his hands with unnecessary care, making sure to comb his fingers through her hair as he stood up and made for the door. "Come, goddess. Please show me exactly how you defeat a demon. And have no worry, if you appear to be in danger, I will intervene and behead the creature myself."

Seeing as there was nothing to do but gain the lord's trust—best as she could now that she'd already been rude to him twice—Sakura got out of bed, neatened it as best she could in the five seconds it took Pein to reach the door and turn around and look impatiently at her, and walked towards him, speeding up only slightly to make up for her lost seconds. When she reached him the first thing she did, almost unwillingly, was look the cloaked man in the eyes, and as she did this, Pein reached over and ran his fingers down the length of her arm.

He had just opened the large door of his chamber when Sakura suddenly queried, "Why do you call me goddess?" The lord halted in the doorway and turned back to look at her. His silver demon-eyes were full of admiration, and tinged only slightly with lust.

"In the world I'm from, there is no one who will spare more than the most meager scrap for their neighbor. There is no one who will give honesty and effort and love to anyone but their own kin. No one but you, Sakura." His finger touched the bottom of her chin and tilted it slightly upwards. Sakura was forced to look at the Lord of Rain, and the Lord of Rain only.

"That is what many would call a goddess."

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November 1st, 6:09 PM

666

The walk from the lord's personal chamber to the unknown place where Sakura's strength would be tested was not a silent one. Sakura was determined to keep conversation going, for the sake of gathering information and also for the sake of distraction. He would be less likely to slam her into a wall if she could keep him talking about his favorite and least favorite shinobi…she hoped.

The conversation was going something like, "Just because she was given the power to morph herself into paper does not mean you can take part of her and write all over it," when Sakura stopped walking at a window carved into the stone wall. She knew just how damned _stupid _it was, halting out of nowhere when the lord of the land expected her to keep up, and then expecting him to stop to suit her own purpose, but then again, she had come to stop all such opinions from existing, so did so anyway. There was bloody knife sitting on the sill, after all, which would not have been so surprising if the blood hadn't been spread in a pattern, almost a word, obviously constructed by someone's bloodstained finger.

It was not a word, she decided a moment later. "Do any of your shinobi…enjoy…painting birds of blood on their weapons?" she asked awkwardly. She wanted to pick it up and give the opposite side of the object a look over, but to do so would not only be rude but simply odd. One did not study bloody objects as they did compasses or watches.

"Hidan, perhaps. His attention span is laughably short. I would not put it past him to scribble on his own weapons." He spoke as though he were not in fact standing behind her, as though he could not see the knife sitting directly below her head.

"It may not be a bird, actually," Sakura muttered, narrowing her eyes in confusion. "This person is very sloppy. It's not a bird at all. I think it's meant to be some kind of cat, sitting down—Where did I get the idea of a bird?—I hope the artist was in a hurry. He needs more practice at—"

Sakura stopped speaking then, for it appeared that there was a finger trying to probe its way into her mouth, and a hand grasping her arm and holding it to the sill.

Stunned and thoroughly dumbstruck, she kept her mouth in the pose it had stopped in: while pronouncing the word "at." Unfortunately, this left a gap between her lips. Two or three more fingers edged closer to this gap and the first made its bold way through. She did not dare name the feeling that entered her with the digit.

She turned her head, and was amazed to find no resistance, striking, yelling or glaring of any sort. But this may have been because she was not facing the lord and could not see his expression.

"There are plenty of other people who would like to bite your fingers," Sakura stated calmly.

"I congratulate you."

"I…haven't done anything."

"You tensed and moved away. You are unsure. This has never happened to you before."

Hadn't she told him that outright? On the other hand, it would only make sense that he was suspicious and did not believe every bit of information she gave him. And on that same note…how much of what he had told her was false?

"Did you put this here?"

"Of course. But it doesn't matter now. We're but one hallway away from learning your true strength and chakra capacity." Sakura's eyes grew wider and her breath slowed. "Rinnegan has shown it to me. It burns in you like a shinobi's."

"Is…is Rinnegan—"

"My eyes. They are the Rinnegan." And his fingers sought out her mouth again, found it closed, and caressed the lips his fingers were swiftly beginning to crave. "Rinnegan does what it pleases, but I control when they shall do it. And it allowed me a glimpse of your chakra before Konan sealed you. I found it almost laughable: that was your chakra _before _the ritual." A particularly flexible finger reached up for her cheek. "It's not as though that's what I needed to see. I felt it first-hand several months ago. I was very rudely punched in the collarbone." There was no pause for Sakura to recollect. It was not needed. "Come. We're nearly there." He removed himself from her and again made his way down the hall.

To counterbalance against swiftly-growing horror, Sakura thought again and again of Iruka and the friends and family of his that all lived literally under one roof, the same people who could be dead this very moment in part because of her.

Remembering her short yet heartwarming time with Iruka's tribe—and despite thoughts of "treason" and "guillotines" and "revenge" moving around in her head—worked very well.

Pein opened the two iron doors at the end of the hall by pulling on the steel rings that were in place of doorknobs. The doors were heavy enough to be soundproof, it seemed, for the moment they budged, a high-pitched and terrified screaming pounded against Sakura's eardrums and set all her senses on high and fierce alert. She ducked under Pein's arm, still moving the doors, and entered the stone chamber.

The room beyond the iron doors was not nearly as large as the indoor stadium where she fought for her life daily against demons, but it held a similar air: a literal air, one tainted by a demon's sweat and the instinct of fear they naturally brought on humans. It was a plain rock dome, with nothing inside it but a floor, smooth walls, torch lamps and two living occupants: one demon and one human woman, the former undoubtedly feeling pleasure, and the latter undoubtedly feeling pain. The mentioned woman was clad in an average rag that most folk round the world would consider a decent women's garment, torn now beyond even the standards of today's people. The demon ripping the stringed ribbons of it away was vaguely worm-shaped, covered in greenish, oozing skin and bearing several protruding appendages resembling arms. Several of these appendages were at work on the woman's body. They scored red lines in her skin, jabbed themselves between her legs, probed at the hot, bare chest it had town away clothes to reach.

The dripping and crying woman was Ayame, and Sakura rushed to her so speedily that she kicked up dust on her way, dust which settled upon the lord's previously stainless cloak.

Like an old friend returned from a journey, the old stirrings of tactic, survival and bloodshed rose in Sakura. She was reminded of her old days as a demon fighter on the short trip from the doorway to the invader of Ayame's virtue. She suddenly remembered that her left punch was stronger than her right, and raised that fist. Without looking down, she kept her foot in mid-air a moment longer, so as not to step on Ayame, she instead set it down a foot or so beyond, on the worm demon's stomach, where it punched through and her toes mashed through organs. The creature's cries of pleasure warped to pain in a single and satisfyingly short second. Not a moment later, Sakura's other foot set down on the stone floor and with it came the left fist. The demon's bulging head turned just in time for its face to be struck by a small, bare hand.

Spinning thrice in the air, the worm demon slapped down on the ground. While it made a struggle to rise again, Sakura whipped around and dropped to the ground on her knees. Her exquisite, shoulder-strap dress was stained with dirt and grit. She studied the whiteness staining Ayame's thighs and knew there was nothing she could give for comfort but words.

"You'll have its offspring in less than a month." Sakura attempted to say this gently. Ayame, not bothering to cover her nearly-bare body, stared at the younger woman crouching by her. The sympathy in her eyes was plain, but also was the dark helplessness. "It'll be better," Sakura added, sounding slightly more awkward, "if your life ends now. If you live through the delivery, I might not be around to kill them for you." Ayame's face contorted.

"My…my father…"

"Decide now, hurry." Sakura said, softly clenching the woman's hand. "It's better if you don't think about it!"

"It ate him already!"

It struck Sakura in the back.

It was nothing but a headbutt, so it seemed, one that shoved her over Ayame and sent her rolling head over heels over dirty dress back in Pein's direction. She paid him no attention now. All her mind was focused on the oncoming demon with a mouth dripping white liquid. It was giving out its ugly and nonsensical bellow, and every inch of it promised danger to her mind and body. The sudden conversion from Sakura's polite persona to that of her neck-snapping one was refreshing as a glass of old wine. It was a very sour glass of wine, for the worm beast had snapped its body like a whip straight over to Sakura's face, and before she knew it she was holding a jaw in each hand, only just keeping the demon from taking a bite out of her head.

She struggled there for several minutes. The creature was too furious at its meal being interrupted to wrap its tentacles around the girl's body; Sakura kept track of each appendage every second. When at last the beast had collected itself enough to realize that its appendages would be useful here, a slimy member began sneaking towards her stomach. Sakura saw the danger immediately and grunted with extra effort. She pulled harder and harder at the two jaws and cried out triumphantly as she tossed the whole creature behind herself. It skidded on the stone floor thrice and then hit the wall with a juicy smack.

It was lively again in moments, and loud. Screeching and showing each of its dull, pink teeth, the worm thrust itself forward. Sakura positioned one foot backward and set her hands ready at her sides, but the worm hit the floor several feet in front of her. The force propelled it up into the air. The warrior gasped in surprise; as the worm fell she steadied herself again.

It hit with three tentacles and Sakura blocked them all with one open hand. It struck with five more and she took a step back and struck the ugly members with her other hand. The process repeated three times and three times again. Never did the worm reach the ground and never did Sakura move her eyes from the opponent.

At last all of the heavy, thick tentacles made a grab, and Sakura let loose the movement she'd been saving: she struck the beast's already wounded stomach and felt her hands punch through the hide. Unsavory insides began dribbling down her wrists, but before they could even get near her new dress the beast hit the ground.

Quickly and smoothly finished, Sakura dashed again towards the trembling Ayame.

"You have to make a decision _now," _she gave her command from several minutes ago again. "Please, the longer you take, the worse it will be."

"Kill me!" the girl wept. She covered a bleeding eye with one hand and stuck one between her dripping legs. "If my father's gone, then, then I can't—please!" She fell on Sakura's chest, still sobbing and staining the precious gown with commoner tears. Sakura was used to such behavior and patted the elder girl's back with practiced and genuine sympathy.

"You just breathe slowly," she murmured softly. "It won't hurt. You'll see your father in a moment."

Ayame was in too deep grief to give any thanks, and continued weeping while Sakura moved small and powerful hands towards her neck. Ayame's body cart-wheeled in the air as Sakura tossed it, and before the end of the movement the girl's fragile spinal cord had been snapped. With a sigh, Sakura smoothed the almost-nonexistent gown over the girl's exposed, torn body to a level of near-decency. When she stood up she found the Lord of Rain had not so much moved his eyes from her.

"I don't understand," he said with a tiny smile. "Your movements are as smooth and strong as a trained shinobi. Perhaps better. Years in the Underground, yes, but—" he paused to make a dark chuckle, "you're a born fighter. I've never seen such a person. If I gave you so much as a month's worth of combat guidance, you could stand your ground against Kakuzu. But what is an arrogant son of a whore to talk of things like that?"

The warrior girl stared, aware and mystified.

The lord's eyes narrowed but his smile stayed the same. "That's a very rude name to call someone. Particularly someone who is both elder and superior. I'm glad you were able to keep a rein on your mouth, though. You're not the sort to spit in the face of your superior."

Briefly the girl had a mental chuckle, in that she was exactly that sort, when times called for it, but desperately and swiftly made her mind blank as a rock slate. She could guess what had gone on, but was afraid to think it had truly occurred.

"Rinnegan has seen your thoughts." he confirmed. "I was very lucky to use it on you when I did. It showed me your chakra when I first used it upon you. And your thoughts not very long ago. You mean to kill me, don't you…Sakura?" He got no response but a carefully blank stare and a firm, steady posture. "Then I'm very lucky to have found you first. I do wonder why I've made you so angry. And how you hide it so well."

"And I wonder how you can stand to let women be violated by animals in your own castle." she said, trying to control her seething anger.

"I wonder how you can stand to kill women so easily and not shed a tear." Pein retorted.

"Because it's better for her." Sakura explained. "Wherever she is now, she's not hurting or having demon children. I can kill someone by thinking that. If they want me to."

"And how do you kill a group of savage bandits?" he asked.

"By breaking bones and shedding blood." Sakura explained flatly. "There's not much thought required for men like them. But men like Iruka deserve much better than being harassed by bandits." She narrowed her eyes, questioning.

The mouth remained in position. "I have no quarrel with any of his people. Any dead of that tribe were killed in battle and not by me. I had no business with them but to retrieve you. But I am not nearly finished." Now, the fear that had been dammed with thoughts of Iruka and Ayame and bloodshed were violently released. She felt herself beginning to shake as the lord let his chakra become "visible," that is, able to be sensed by others with chakra. "Perhaps I will train you. I'd like to see exactly what would happen if I were challenged by a little girl. What a shame it would be to kill one like you. But perhaps I may change my mind." His eyebrow may have raise or Sakura's vision may have been failing with the thick chakra around her. "You may leave this room and wander the castle only to meet with me in a dark hall." The implication stood alone through the rest of the words.

Again the eyes of circular silver stone blasted into Sakura's mind. They surrounded the cracked, writhing emerald, drilled through it, bore deadly holes in it, let worms crawl through them like joyous children, and glowed like the hard and metal crown of a king. Her knees threatened to give and only by holding her breath could Sakura hold them in place.

At last, for the first time in long, grave minutes Pein moved. He made for the huge stone doors not five feet behind him and moved one of them with two fingers. "I shall have to tell the Xian villagers that their lovely Ayame has been murdered. You are free to move about my castle as you please."

"I'll see you very soon, little goddess."

The stone door slammed shut.

666

A door slamming, leaving the hero/heroine in darkness: no matter the situation, that is like the most classic cliffhanger ever. Speaking of movies, I went to the soundtrack of "I Am Legend" movie on iTunes and used the song "I'm Listening" as inspiration for the bulk of this chapter, (as well as various "Kung Fu Panda" fights) even though the mood of that song and this chapter doesn't match at all. It's a sad instrumental and well worth the ninety-nine cents.

Happy Steelers Win The Superbowl Day :D

Ta…Storm


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